Mastodon (not heavy metal)

[discovolante]

I feel quite bamboozled by mastodon at the moment (I set up an account with my real name a while back though and still have it, so that's nice), I don't really understand how you view other instances or any of that stuff. But I felt the same about twitter when I first started using it. Tbf threading on twitter was a nightmare for a long time and has got more user friendly but I guess my point is, part of the confusion is just unfamiliarity and maybe needing to take a bit of time to read the instructions as it were.

[lpm]

How is Masto de-echo chambered? If our Instance of Goodies blocks an Instance of Baddies, won't it just be all of us agreeing with ourselves?

[El Pollo Diablo]

The best social media site I know of is called Scrutable. If everyone on twitter joined that, it would be fab.

Not everyone...

[dyqik]

How is Masto de-echo chambered? If our Instance of Goodies blocks an Instance of Baddies, won't it just be all of us agreeing with ourselves?

There's lots of instances which do operate together quite happily. And you can join multiple instances.

Nazis shouting everyone down and abusing people off the platform because they aren't blocked is also an echo chamber.

[lpm]

It's not Nazis that make an echo chamber problem.

The problem is at the normal level of sane people, but sane people failing to get outside their group think. It's PistonHeads inhabiting only piston world, never speaking to EV Drivers in EV world.

Is Masto's starting point a division into categories? That feels worse than the usual evolution towards division by categories.

[dyqik]

It's not Nazis that make an echo chamber problem.

The problem is at the normal level of sane people, but sane people failing to get outside their group think. It's PistonHeads inhabiting only piston world, never speaking to EV Drivers in EV world.

Is Masto's starting point a division into categories? That feels worse than the usual evolution towards division by categories.

No, it's starting point is not a division into categories.

It's a division into instances, some of which are intended for specific categories, many of which are much more general. And you can see and boost (retweet) posts by anyone on an instance that your instance federates with. So in your home instance, you'll see toots from other instances boosted by people on your instance.

It's really no different to how the web in general works. On Twitter you can see Facebook posts that are screenshotted and shared, or "The Best Of Nextdoor", or links to news articles. Mastodon as a system is designed to do that and to make it even easier to share content and interact with people from other instances than it is to e.g. interact with people on Facebook that you found via Twitter.

[lpm]

You've just described a starting point of division into categories but said its starting point is not a division into categories.

What you are describing sounds like Scrutable able to see and boost posts by anyone on PistonHeads, because the two forums are federated. Which means information flows freely. But the starting point is division into loose groupings. There's group think in the foundations.

And then when EPD gets fed up of the relentless stupidity of PistonHeads, he defederates them? If we want to carry on seeing their posts we can easily enough by switching instances. But inertia of people not bothering would mean in reality most of us would stop seeing their loose aggregation and we'd see more of our loose aggregation.

[Stephanie]

It's not Nazis that make an echo chamber problem.

The problem is at the normal level of sane people, but sane people failing to get outside their group think. It's PistonHeads inhabiting only piston world, never speaking to EV Drivers in EV world.

Is Masto's starting point a division into categories? That feels worse than the usual evolution towards division by categories.

No, it's starting point is not a division into categories.

It's a division into instances, some of which are intended for specific categories, many of which are much more general. And you can see and boost (retweet) posts by anyone on an instance that your instance federates with. So in your home instance, you'll see toots from other instances boosted by people on your instance.

It's really no different to how the web in general works. On Twitter you can see Facebook posts that are screenshotted and shared, or "The Best Of Nextdoor", or links to news articles. Mastodon as a system is designed to do that and to make it even easier to share content and interact with people from other instances than it is to e.g. interact with people on Facebook that you found via Twitter.

Yeah, mastodon.social, which I'm on, is just a general mastodon instance, with even less rules than here:

Sexually explicit or violent media must be marked as sensitive when posting
No racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, or casteism
No incitement of violence or promotion of violent ideologies
No harassment, dogpiling or doxxing of other users
No content illegal in Germany
Do not share intentionally false or misleading information

[Stephanie]

You've just described a starting point of division into categories but said its starting point is not a division into categories.

What you are describing sounds like Scrutable able to see and boost posts by anyone on PistonHeads, because the two forums are federated. Which means information flows freely. But the starting point is division into loose groupings. There's group think in the foundations.

And then when EPD gets fed up of the relentless stupidity of PistonHeads, he defederates them? If we want to carry on seeing their posts we can easily enough by switching instances. But inertia of people not bothering would mean in reality most of us would stop seeing their loose aggregation and we'd see more of our loose aggregation.

This really only happens on the smaller instances where you get fights between them. The big instances tend to block only the obvious bad ones, that are say, set up specifically to harass users or are made up of bots that spam people

[jimbob]

How is Masto de-echo chambered? If our Instance of Goodies blocks an Instance of Baddies, won't it just be all of us agreeing with ourselves?

Yup, that was my question and one feature that Twitter had/has as an advantage

[dyqik]

You've just described a starting point of division into categories but said its starting point is not a division into categories.

What you are describing sounds like Scrutable able to see and boost posts by anyone on PistonHeads, because the two forums are federated. Which means information flows freely. But the starting point is division into loose groupings. There's group think in the foundations.

And then when EPD gets fed up of the relentless stupidity of PistonHeads, he defederates them? If we want to carry on seeing their posts we can easily enough by switching instances. But inertia of people not bothering would mean in reality most of us would stop seeing their loose aggregation and we'd see more of our loose aggregation.

This really only happens on the smaller instances where you get fights between them. The big instances tend to block only the obvious bad ones, that are say, set up specifically to harass users or are made up of bots that spam people

And if a big instance does start to dick around blocking random things, then people notice and decamp to other instances that don't do that.

You see this with localized Reddit and Facebook groups as well, where mod/admin abuse leads to other groups seeing up and people moving.

Which is also what's happening with Twitter right now, but with a much bigger barrier to moving.

[dyqik]

How is Masto de-echo chambered? If our Instance of Goodies blocks an Instance of Baddies, won't it just be all of us agreeing with ourselves?

Yup, that was my question and one feature that Twitter had/has as an advantage

Twitter is heavily echochambered due to the number of people who didn't want anything to do with that kind of platform, or who joined and were hounded off it.

See David Allen Green's blog post today for an example of this mechanism - https://davidallengreen.com/2022/11/fro ... -mastodon/

[lpm]

It's pretty much established that all social media evolves towards echochamberism.

Which is why it seems odd to have a starting point that bunches people, even if only very loosely.

It would be more interesting to have random assignment of joiners to an instance, with weighting of feeds towards that random instance. Echochamberisation would still occur, with people finding like-minded people on other instances, but there'd be a starting bias towards a random cluster.

[dyqik]

It's pretty much established that all social media evolves towards echochamberism.

Which is why it seems odd to have a starting point that bunches people, even if only very loosely.

It would be more interesting to have random assignment of joiners to an instance, with weighting of feeds towards that random instance. Echochamberisation would still occur, with people finding like-minded people on other instances, but there'd be a starting bias towards a random cluster.

That's effectively happening now, with several big instances not able to accept new users due to load, so people finding random instances to join.

[Stephanie]

It's pretty much established that all social media evolves towards echochamberism.

Which is why it seems odd to have a starting point that bunches people, even if only very loosely.

It would be more interesting to have random assignment of joiners to an instance, with weighting of feeds towards that random instance. Echochamberisation would still occur, with people finding like-minded people on other instances, but there'd be a starting bias towards a random cluster.

That's effectively happening now, with several big instances not able to accept new users due to load, so people finding random instances to join.

Was just about to say that. Back when I joined, I got an invite specifically to .social, but other people went via the join mastodon page and hit the next randomly available server. It was run by someone in Japan, who was a bit surprised to suddenly get a lot of Twitter users on the instance, but happily let them post anyway.

[Woodchopper]

Question for you old hands.

I’ve downloaded the app and set up an account. First issue is who to follow. Mastodon gave me some suggestions but they seemed random and not interesting.

I’m trying to work out the following:

How do I keyword search so as to find those people that are posting stuff that I’m interested in? I’ve found a thing to search hashtags but they haven’t been useful.

Is it possible to browse posts in the instance I’ve signed up to?

I realise that keyword search is like Twitter and browsing posts is like Reddit. So Mastodon is supposed to be different. But without either I’m feeling a bit lost as to how to find interesting stuff.

[monkey]

Question for you old hands.

I’ve downloaded the app and set up an account. First issue is who to follow. Mastodon gave me some suggestions but they seemed random and not interesting.

I’m trying to work out the following:

How do I keyword search so as to find those people that are posting stuff that I’m interested in? I’ve found a thing to search hashtags but they haven’t been useful.

Is it possible to browse posts in the instance I’ve signed up to?

I realise that keyword search is like Twitter and browsing posts is like Reddit. So Mastodon is supposed to be different. But without either I’m feeling a bit lost as to how to find interesting stuff.

Was about to post similar.

Sign up was fine, I just chose a popular server and it was easy-peasy, but had nothing to look at once I was in and the search wasn't useful. I reckon it'll be alright once I've found a few people to follow though. I've heard about 3rd party apps, anyone got recommendations for those, if they work better?

[bjn]

From what I understand, you can’t keyword search on Mastadon, only hashtags. This is deliberate. If you are having a conversation about vegan cheese or whatever, it stops randos searching for “vegan cheese” and gate crashing it with abuse. If you want to make it searchable, add in a #vegancheese tag.

[Woodchopper]

From what I understand, you can’t keyword search on Mastadon, only hashtags. This is deliberate. If you are having a conversation about vegan cheese or whatever, it stops randos searching for “vegan cheese” and gate crashing it with abuse. If you want to make it searchable, add in a #vegancheese tag.

Ok, interesting. So it’s different from Reddit and Twitter in that the toots are kind of semi-private. Someone could find them by following the people but it’s set up so that it’s not possible to find a specific toot unless the author wanted it to be by adding a hashtag.

Makes sense but then the network is fulfilling a different role to Twitter.

[dyqik]

Question for you old hands.

I’ve downloaded the app and set up an account. First issue is who to follow. Mastodon gave me some suggestions but they seemed random and not interesting.

I’m trying to work out the following:

How do I keyword search so as to find those people that are posting stuff that I’m interested in? I’ve found a thing to search hashtags but they haven’t been useful.

Is it possible to browse posts in the instance I’ve signed up to?

I realise that keyword search is like Twitter and browsing posts is like Reddit. So Mastodon is supposed to be different. But without either I’m feeling a bit lost as to how to find interesting stuff.

Was about to post similar.

Sign up was fine, I just chose a popular server and it was easy-peasy, but had nothing to look at once I was in and the search wasn't useful. I reckon it'll be alright once I've found a few people to follow though. I've heard about 3rd party apps, anyone got recommendations for those, if they work better?

There are tools that will go through the people you follow on Twitter, checking for Mastodon usernames/servers in their Twitter bios, to give you a list of those that are in both places.

[Stephanie]

I think debirdify is one https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

[bjn]

From what I understand, you can’t keyword search on Mastadon, only hashtags. This is deliberate. If you are having a conversation about vegan cheese or whatever, it stops randos searching for “vegan cheese” and gate crashing it with abuse. If you want to make it searchable, add in a #vegancheese tag.

Ok, interesting. So it’s different from Reddit and Twitter in that the toots are kind of semi-private. Someone could find them by following the people but it’s set up so that it’s not possible to find a specific toot unless the author wanted it to be by adding a hashtag.

Makes sense but then the network is fulfilling a different role to Twitter.

Which is no necessarily a bad thing!

[dyqik]

I think debirdify is one https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

That does seem to work.

[monkey]

I'm getting the hang of it. Found a couple of people I like on twitter and had a look at who they're following and what hashtags they're using to find more people who seem sensible. I like it so far, it seems like a much nicer place than twitter, which I only ever lurked on. Think I just need to work out which servers I'd like to hang around on now. And find a better way to do it on the desktop.

[dyqik]

For those that follow liberalish US journalists plus some others, the Verified By Walt Shaub list is helpful.

https://journa.host/@WalterShaub/109305403424338910

Journa.host is an instance set up recently to help journalists transition to Mastodon, and it's working on a proper verification system for that application.