Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
jrmg
Joeboy
You actually can't sign up on mastodon.social at the moment. I thought the same, all the instances are for weirdly specific groups I'm not in. You don't have this problem with email, there's no requirement to choose an email address that matches your political tendencies, sexual kinks etc.
I eventually chose fosstodon.org which seems like about the most vanilla thing that's open to new users and where I have a decent claim to being the right kind of person. I suspect a lot of people will look at the long list of furry-centric instances and conclude Mastodon is not for them. IDK, maybe that's considered a feature.
berkes
But it really is the same with mastodon. You don't need to find an instance that matches your political tendencies, furry niche, or whatever.
Just pick one that feels right. Maybe you are French or Korean and like a server in French or Korean, or maybe you feel very strong about politics: the make that a parameter. Otherwise just go for any "general" server.
Just like with email, people will generally just pick Hotmail, AOL, xs4all.nl, yahoo or email, without much thought. This is fine.
You can easily move later if you ever find a community that you wish to be part of.
Joeboy
> Otherwise just go for any "general" server
That's exactly what I tried, and failed, to do. As far as I was able to discover, including via the site being discussed here, there are no such servers currently available for new signups.
shadowgovt
You and a lot of other people. I see this blind spot in the open source community from time to time regarding decision paralysis and I'm surprised that more people don't realize how much of an issue it is for a lot of users.
I don't want to think about what server I'm on. I want the whole thing to just work. The fact that there is only one Twitter and only one Facebook are actually advantages in the marketplace for those services.
lrvick
Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?
This is what freedom looks like, vs going to a defacto centralized megacorp and having them tell you where to live so that they can most efficiently manipulate and spy on you for profit.
Everyone has become far too accustomed with exploitative corpos telling them what to do on the internet. Choices are harder, but healthier.
Just make a choice, and you can make a different one later.
jrmg
Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?
Yes! Doesn’t everyone to some degree? That’s a huge decision that takes me days to decide.
Just make a choice, and you can make a different one later.
If we’re going with a housing analogy, this is pretty terrible advice. But I don’t think the housing analogy really applies. Where someone lives says (in my mind) a lot less about them - but is also a much more important personal decision.
You’ve implied a few times in this thread that complaints about Mastodon are because people are somehow accustomed to being told what to do by corporations. That is quite hyperbolic, and I also don’t really think it’s true.
I don’t see how caring about what a public choice appears to say about me has anything to do with that.
shadowgovt
> Do you get decision paralysis when deciding what home to buy or what apartment to live in?
Yes, of course. That involves a mortgage, location, the logistics of moving...
ISL
When you move because you don't like the instance anymore, how do all of your connections follow you?
This, to me, is the central problem in the Fediverse.
allenu
I've been using Mastodon on and off for a few years now and the thing that bugged me was that the benefits it was pushing at first were absolutely uninteresting to me as a user: it's decentralized and you can pick your server. Those aren't exactly things a general user is going to care about or even understand. They just want to know how to sign up and follow interesting people. The fact that there wasn't any trending (or usable search) for a while made it also feel like a ghost town. You create your new account and look around and think, "Okay, where's the activity?" I suppose it wasn't really meant to be twitter, so my criticisms may not be entirely fair.
jrnichols
you pick your server and see if they approve your account too. This was an issue that I encountered. I made accounts on a couple different instances but didn't make it through their approval process and had no idea why.
ncr100
Should just lead with advice "CHOOSE THE FIRST YOU LIKE AND CHANGE IT LATER".
Opine:
The "tell me what to think" motivation is frustrating from multiple perspectives:
- overt bias of the Tellers is rife with unethical potential
- low engagement of the Users is a part of communication, it's reality and why the style of Exciting Content (insert emojis) has become popular in modern communication vs the 'respectably formatted and spell-checked' of yesteryear
josteink
> I don't want to think about what server I'm on.
Maybe I’m the exception but for me almost without exception the answer is that I want to run my own instance.
What’s the point of leaving a centralized system for a decentralized one if you still let someone else own your data?
parminya
People aren't mass-leaving Twitter because Twitter owns their data. They were happy with someone else owning their data to the extent that they were users of Twitter. They're mass-leaving Twitter becomes Elon Musk bought Twitter. Elon Musk cannot buy Mastodon. He might buy your particular server, but the chances he'd try to are much more remote because the benefit of doing so is much less.
mynameismonkey
Agreed. I've been pasting this anywhere I see the frustration
Think of it like your phone number, it's a service and you need a provider. Choose one by location https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094 makes no difference, they all talk to each other and you can move servers at any time
And it's curated for servers that are open for registration so hopefully no dead ends
tekchip
Totally this. Did decision fatigue stop you from using email? It didn't because they all talk. It doesn't really matter which you choose.
This is especially true now that there is an official system to change/move servers.
phoe-krk
> How do I find a server that ‘matches’ me but doesn’t make me seem like an over-enthusiastic single-issue or single-hobby dedicant
Just don't care about it that much, really. My main account has been at https://functional.cafe for years now, but I'm posting about pretty much everything there: programming, music, art, politics, current events, shitposting.
> and also isn’t run by someone whose (perhaps currently unespoused) views I’d find problematic?
Ask someone from your friend circle who's already on Fediverse, but also see the above point.
jrmg
Just don’t care about what the first thing people will see that’s specifically about me says about me? I don’t think I can bring myself to do that.
flkiwi
Then signing up for a general instance (mastodon.social, mas.to, etc.) makes sense. It's like (as in exactly like) signing up for gmail vs. having a custom domain.
BryantD
This is not at all obvious, but it's fairly easy to move your Mastodon account and leave a forwarding notice behind: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
kixiQu
FWIW, most of us don't pay that much attention to it unless it's an instance with a very good or bad reputation, and even then, new users aren't really presumed to know what they signed up for.
Kiro
If this is the best response hardcore fans of Mastodon can come up with, I don't have much hope.
socialismisok
This is 100% why I haven't signed up yet. It's like walking into a blockbuster video and being told, "you can pick one movie from this store, but everyone will know which movie you pick, and the director of that movie will be able to control what other movies you get to see."
The analysis paralysis this induces is incredible.
lrvick
It is more like you previously could -only- obtain movies from Blockbuster and you loved that they recommended sponsored movies whenever you visited. You did not have to think.
Now Blockbuster is gone and there are a pile of other ways to obtain movies out there and you are complaining that choosing one is hard. It is entertainment and they all have access to the same movies so it is not that important of a choice.
josteink
> and the director of that movie will be able to control what other movies you get to see
That’s not true though, is it?
Aren’t you able to consume content from anywhere else in the fediverse?
flkiwi
You can unless an admin specifically blocks another instance. It doesn't seem to be that common in practice (other than blocking the content that you'd expect to be blocked or, IIRC, a handful of servers that effectively de-federate).
elcapitan
To me it's like the difference between living in an anonymous big city where I can do whatever I want without too many people yelling at me, and having to pick some village where everybody knows everybody and forces their rules on them. I would never choose the latter just by my own nature, so Mastodon will never be an alternative to twitter for me. Looking at that endless list of specialized echo chambers of some people with their own sub rules just makes me shudder immediately.
lrvick
If you want to be on your own sovereign island you can host your own Mastodon instance or pay a monthly fee to one of the many Managed Mastodon providers and even use your own domain name.
It is not that much different from choosing an email provider.
Cyberdog
You're overthinking it. Find an instance that seems friendly and sign up. If it turns out you don't like it there, you can migrate to another one; barring defederation issues, everyone who is following you on the old instance will follow you on the new one automatically. Unfortunately the list of people that you follow isn't automatically migrated, but some front ends reduce the pain of this by letting you export a list of follow-ees on the old instance and then import it on the new one.
Just do it!
mabcat
That's such a strange piece of UX. As a typical user, who on average consumes content rather than produces it, what I care about is that my list of followed accounts migrates with me so that my feed stays relatively consistent. As a content producer I would also care about my past posts migrating with me, which they don't. Having followers continue to follow me after migration is only the primary concern for the "influencer". I get that "my friends can still find me" is an important feature but who thought it was ok to skip the other two?
kixiQu
Followed accounts are easier to do manually; there's a simple export / import interface that existed before the account move feature.
I will note that for you "as a content producer" the uniformly reverse chronological presentation on Mastodon highly penalizes older posts (even a day old!) to an extent that is pretty rough to get used to, and that makes those older posts pretty irrelevant to move over. This is much like Twitter before its engagement-maximization algorithm days, though.
dredmorbius
It doesn't matter ... too much.
I've been on Mastodon since 2016. I've switched instances twice, once when the instance was shut down (the maintainer gave several months' notice), once when instance ownership changed.
The first time was early enough that profile migration didn't exist ... and it still wasn't much of a deal. I follow a few hundred profiles, and am followed by about 2,000. It turns out that it's pretty easy to re-associate, at least for individuals. (Commercial / brand profiles with large follow/follower lists would have a different experience.) We reconnected pretty easily.
The more recent switch used profile migration. This brings along your followers / following lists, as well as block and mute lists, and is straightforward. Toots are not migrated, but for the most part Mastodon "lives in the present", and the back-catalogue isn't particularly significant. (I care more about this than most, and ... it's still not that big a deal.)
I actually have several active profiles, though all are forwarded to my primary active one: <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius>. Again, if I need to fallback to another instance, I can.
Larger instances tend to be fairly anodyne. Smaller instances tend to fit niches, of both specific interests and policies. Pick something that looks reasonable. If you decide you want to change at a later date, it's not a big deal.
TheBrokenRail
100% this!
There doesn't seem to be many general servers that:
1. I can trust won't just shut down in a week.
2. Are accepting signups
3. And won't end up having a negative stigma a in year when the creator goes off a deep end. I know I can just switch to another instance, but I really don't want to have to do that frequently.
Matrix at least solves this by just having an official Matrix home-server. Matrix is still federated, but if you just want to just sign-up and join a chat room, you're not forced to pick a home-server that's specific to you or worry about the factors above.
defulmere
On Twitter I've seen a lot of criticism of the whole idea of "choose a server" when joining Mastodon (and the fediverse in general).
Instead of lists of servers, I wonder if a better onboarding workflow would be...
- What username do you want?
- What are your interests? (click, click, click)
- Backend checks availability of username on matching servers
- Pick one of these: @username@abc.social, @username@def.org, @username@xyz.social (with a description of the community associated with each result).
In my opinion this could make the process feel more like choosing an email address which, again in my opinion, could be more familiar than "choose a server".
dane-pgp
That's actually a fantastic idea, and I assume that the main barrier to implementing this isn't a technical one, but the coordination problem of getting enough instance admins to opt-in to appearing on this system, and finding some neutral third party to maintain it (potentially the same people as run this instances.social site).
Splitting your user story into smaller tasks, it seems like the technical side could be implemented as follows:
- An agreed API / JSON format / microformat for instances to list the top 3 user interests that distinguish them from other instances (ideally using Wikidata Q identifiers[0], to create a consistent cross-language taxonomy) and maybe a paragraph of text to give a fuller description of the community
- An agreed API for checking whether a username is already taken on an instance (and maybe a standardised query string format supported by each instance, which allows a third party site to send their visitor to that instance in such a way that the visitor is presented with a sign-up page where the username box is already filled)
- A site with a neutral domain name like "join the fediverse . party" (or just re-use instances.social if that's catchy enough), with the UX you describe
- A way for new instance admins to submit their instance for inclusion (which triggers some automated checks like "is this instance online?" and "which parts of the fediverse does it federate with?")
Actually the hard part is probably preventing Sybil-attacks, since some attacker could create millions of dummy instances that have only one user on (though the instances will no doubt lie and claim to have billions of users). Maybe there does need to be some cabal or union of instance admins who can be trusted to give estimates for how many genuine users are probably on the smaller instances they federate with (reporting "0" or "negative infinity" for instances which they block).
kixiQu
https://instances.social/ already has a wizard that does a good chunk of this, though not, I believe, with username availability checking. There are a lot of different entry points and they don't all pursue the same polish, for better or worse.
mattkevan
Mastodon is interesting as like a lot of open-source projects it focuses on solving a technical problem over a user-experience problem. And it’s why, even if Elon drives Twitter into a ditch, like a Tesla on FSD, it’ll never become the replacement.
The problem being solved with Mastodon is ‘like Twitter but open source and without central control’. Federated! Decentralised! Instances!
Great for people who are interested in that sort of thing, but I can guarantee that most Twitter users couldn’t give two shits about any of that, just as they don’t care about Twitter’s infrastructure.
Things people do care about are ease of use (do I have to spend more time thinking about how to post than what to post?) and audience (are there things to see and will my stuff be seen?).
With Twitter the answers are clear, but with Mastodon the emphasis on solving a particular architecture problem has led to a host of usability issues that each add friction to the experience.
People who care about federation and ownership and all that may be willing to push through, but I’m not sure most would.
ncr100
MD is irritating in the wrong ways, agreed. Federation functionality is cool and needs to be built upon.
Twitter is irritating in the right way. In addition to posts w/ multimedia it has "identity", threading, boosting, and manual+auto moderation.
socialismisok
Mastodon evokes feelings of "year of Linux desktop" in me. Yes, Linux is a great desktop but no, I don't think people are ready to just up and move.
Mastodon is probably great, but I don't think people are ready to move there.
shadowgovt
It's a lot more usable than I thought it would be when I joined up. And it has a lot of features Twitter doesn't have that I really appreciate... The fact that I can use markdown is pretty great.
I don't think it will be for everybody... The federated discoverability is going to be a turnoff for a lot of individuals. But it's well cleared the bar of of "this will be constant pain if you sign up."
emptyparadise
I don't think Linux desktop has had its "Windows might implode and randomly shut down in the next year" moment yet. I can kind of see why Mastodon is getting discussed here again.
socialismisok
That's fair. Musk is throwing a truly monumental, once in a century scale meltdown.
chc
Yeah, we don't have Nadella publicly screaming about how left-wing advertising execs are about to destroy Microsoft, begging celebrities for money, and laying off half the company with no warning. Twitter genuinely looks in need of replacement at the moment.
cmrdporcupine
It's not going to replace Twitter. It's just something else.
But you're wrong about people being ready to move there. It's added 230k users in the last week, and in the last 24 hours in particular growth has started to look a bit exponential with just under 70k users being added, ~3000ish an hour. Despite the biggest server (mastodon.social) being overwhelmed and not being able to take new users.
Growth right now is about as rapid as possible.
socialismisok
Nice! Will be cool to see if that's sustainable.
linsomniac
Another option: Sign up at masto.host for $6/mo and run your own instance, they rate that as good for up to 5 active users, so you could even invite some family or friends. I almost went that route, but someone I knew did that and invited me to join theirs. Review: It has been speedy.
mdaEyebot
Is it really too much to ask for people to host their own content on a cheap VPS?
Wouldn't that neatly solve the content moderation problem? You register your server on an index or two, and you choose what your server will publish and accept. Each user would be responsible for finding a hosting provider who doesn't have a problem with what you post, and problematic content reports would go right to the hosting providers. The indexers could basically be DNS for usernames.
The AWS free tier would cover 99% of people, and between VNC and web UIs, you wouldn't necessarily need them to ever touch a shell. Plus, requiring a reasonably consistent public IP address would help to cut down on bulk spam.
mabcat
For sure it's too much to ask.
Get started on Twitter: 1. go to twitter.com 2. enter your name and phone number
Get started on Pleroma: https://docs.pleroma.social/backend/installation/debian_base...
Get started on Mastodon: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/ [page 1 of 12]
For the full effect, do the install with an iPhone.
mdaEyebot
Does it sound elitist to say that maybe a small barrier to entry could make for better quality social networks? Especially if the tradeoff was giving users more creative control over their spaces?
I guess you wouldn't get billions in ad revenue that way, but your expenses could be miniscule, and isn't it possible that a rapacious profit motive is part of the core problem with Meta, Twitter, & co?
Or are there really too few people in the world who could figure out how to log into a <$5/mo cloud VM?
valdiorn
"Is it really too much to ask for people to host their own content on a cheap VPS"
That is the most out of touch question I have ever read on the internet. It is hilariously ridiculous :)
I'm a professional developer with active AWS and DigitalOcean accounts and there's no way in hell I would spend time setting up my own mastodon instance. Can you imagine my tech illiterate cousin who likes to tweet about celebrity gossip doing this?
People hosting their own social media servers is pure delusion.
kixiQu
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
Almost a third of American adults can't achieve computer tasks comparable in difficulty to "delete an email message." Only about a third can manage tasks comparable to: "You want to find a sustainability-related document that was sent to you by John Smith in October last year."
mabcat
masto.host was an option yesterday, now it looks like it won't be an option for the next few days.
I was about to install self-hosted Mastodon but the machine load and amount of admin chores seemed too high. I've installed self-hosted Pleroma instead. Pleroma has 2% the DAU count of Mastodon, I'm starting to wonder if I'm missing out on the main experience, but I also don't want the main experience to be "server administration".
BryantD
Should Mastodon fans just be phrasing this kind of choice as if it were email?
"You can have an email account on any number of servers, and you can send email anywhere, no matter where your account is."
"You can have a Mastodon account on whichever server you like, and you can follow people anywhere, no matter where your account is."
It just seems like a paradigm people already understand that might be more welcoming.
Normille
And, to continue the email analogy [in response to all the "Just change servers if you don't like the one you signed up for"]
If you don't like your email provider, just change to a different one...
Oh yeah. And you'll lose all your previous emails. But we won't mention that.
emptyparadise
That seems like a really nice way to do it.
"You can sign up with one of these main instances and follow people no matter where their account is. If you find make a lot of friends in a specific corner of the Fediverse, or just want to switch to another instance, you can do so whenever you want."
cmrdporcupine
In fact I've seen that analogy made many times on Mastodon in the last week.
ThrowawayTestr
Does this list include controversial instances that have been defederated?
bsagdiyev
Not sure why this is light grey ("downvoted") -- it's a legit question.
maxbond
I don't think it was downvoted because people think it's an illegitimate question, but because it's generally seen as an imposition on people's time to ask a question that could be readily answered by clicking through to the site in question and having a look. That is, after all, what anyone else would do in order to answer the question. (I didn't vote on this comment.)
bsagdiyev
Understood. I took it also as a statement, people seem to be up in arms about free speech and Twitter but from what I seen Mastodon will gladly announce their silencing of opinions which seem to be anything not democrat adjacent. As a squarely middle of the road voter why would I want to use something like Mastodon?
Edit: fuck it maybe I'll setup an instance for people similar to me and see what happens. I don't buy fully in to either side and it's hard to find social groups that feel similarly.
ThrowawayTestr
Unless I already know what instances to look for, how could I search for them?
Normille
>it's generally seen as an imposition on people's time to ask a question that could be readily answered by clicking through to the site in question and having a look
Anyone remember when Gab had the biggest Mastodon instance by far, by user numbers, but all the Mastodon indexes were pretending it didn't even exist? The myth of the Fediverse as some libertarian promised land free from censorship and heavy handed control is just farcical.
Cyberdog
I've seen a couple "free speech" instances in the list, yes.
socialismisok
The link is there, go try it and report back.
allenu
I feel like the fact that there are different servers out there has made zero difference in how I use mastodon. I follow some people and that's it. I hardly ever view the local feed. I suppose the problem is I didn't really shop around for a specific server that matched my needs, but when you're starting out, what do you even know what you're looking for? And how do you know what difference it will even make?
hobo_mark
Since it's supposedly 'decentralized', and this is HN, what are the downsides to just hosting a private ActivityPub instance and following people from there? Plus my account would not be tied to someone else's instance (since I can take my domain and vps with me).
M2Ys4U
I've run my own single-user instance since 2018 - the biggest downside is discoverability and community.
Discoverability: With other users on the instance the federated timeline is populated by posts from users that others on your instance follow, so you have to follow people a bit more liberally to discover other posts.
Community: Instances also have a local timeline, which shows posts from others on the instance and this gives each one a slightly different vibe. With a single-user instance it's just your posts!
But either way, you can still interact with pretty much anybody else in the Fediverse, and once you're followed by a couple of people your posts will go out to the federated timelines of other instances and you'll get interactions via that.
blep_
I do this, and more people should. People on huge multi-user instances are completely missing the point of federation.
The downsides are the usual sysadmin stuff that comes with running servers for anything. People also get excited about the instance-local timelines on multi-user instances, but again, that's completely missing the point.
Macha
Yes (apart from the instances which operate on a whitelist basis for federation)
cmrdporcupine
You can and should do this, if you have the time and energy to do so.
jrnichols
yes, you can most certainly do that.
schoen
As other people have said, it's kind of scary to think about getting an account somewhere and not understanding that that "place" has a specific culture or political orientation that ends up making me a bad fit for it in a way I didn't understand.
And I guess imagine there are some potentially significant incentive problems about the way that instances talk about themselves and their communities.
How does the federation part work in practice when people run their own instances?
M2Ys4U
Most people don't (and won't) run their own instances, either because they lack the skills or resources (including time).
nixcraft
It would be best if you had users and followers to broadcast messages. Right now, mastodon feels like a ghost town. But who knows? There was a time when MySpace was king. Only time will tell ..
Also, Twitter works because of eyeballs. However, with so many Mastodon instances, people need to learn and find out who the real @nixcraft is. Sorry to say this, but I don't think so; we have an actual Twitter replacement right now. In another six months, someone might build it, or Elon will make it better or send it to /dev/null.
ay
We don’t have the replacement for AOL either. We have the internet instead. Things evolve.
As for who the “real” @nixcraft is - how would I know it on Twitter ? The intuition is “first come first serve”, but you are one account hijack away from having to explain that actually @nixcraft is not the real one, despite claiming to be so, and actually @latest_nixcraft is the true yourself.
You would probably do so in the other places that people know you own: your website, your email sig, your GitHub account, your HN profile. Same as you are doing right now. (I checked only the HN profile)
With that method, what is the obstacle to adding the domain name after that handle ?
yogthos
It's kind of weird to me to say that a platform with millions of users on it is a ghost town. I have both twitter and Mastodon accounts, and I find the opposite to be true. I have roughly the same number of followers on both platforms, and I find that I see far more interaction on Mastodon than I do on Twitter.
cmrdporcupine
Doesn't feel like a ghost town to me? I've watched my feed explode in the last week though. Now I almost wish for a ranking algorithm.
You won't see jack shit until you start following people, though. It steadfastly will refuse to spoonfeed you. You have to manually curate your feed.
So it can feel a bit bare at first... But I think the last few years has shown the downsides of the "let me show you what I think you should like" approach...
230,000 new users in the last week, 68,000 of them just in the last 24 hours. Currently at about 30,000 posts per hour. (according to @mastodonusercount@bitcoinhackers.org). Growth throughout the week was averaging about 1000-1200 an hour, but in the last 24 hour that has double or tripled.
berkes
If you feel strongly about claiming the real nixcraft, you can host your own instance at nixcraft.com. or get one for approx the price of that infamous blue-check.
Only a person in control of nixcraft com can have an account like @nix@nixcraft.com.
Something extremely powerful and for free through federation. E.g. journalists or politicians who "require" a validated checkmark, would benefit from their company or party having an instance.
cmrdporcupine
I am liking Mastodon a lot, and digging the general vibe and liking the smaller server I'm on. But can't help but feel that we're just a bit of time and marketing away from somebody "professional" coming along and creating a massive instance that federates into it, and tries to fill the Twitter niche more directly. Mastodon.social got overwhelmed, and it's interesting that there's nothing else to fill that niche of "I don't care which server, I just want to be where the crowd is"
Maybe some ex-Twitter employees should fork Mastodon and go from there?
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
This highlights why I’m so far not on Mastodon: Decision fatigue.
How do I find a server that ‘matches’ me but doesn’t make me seem like an over-enthusiastic single-issue or single-hobby dedicant - and also isn’t run by someone whose (perhaps currently unespoused) views I’d find problematic?
Maybe I should just join what seems to be the default (because of its friendly domain?) of http://mastodon.social. But that seems defeat the purpose of decentralization - and (without evidence) I don’t really trust that mastodon.social is set up to handle the huge influx of users at the moment…