This is a clearer way to express what instances are on Mastodon.
The advantage of Mastodon (controlling your data more, more resistant to single-owner issues and more) gets muddled by talking about the reality of it sloppily.
Like how "it's federated" is less intelligible than "like email, you can be on anybody's server (the @example.com part) and still communicate fine with people on another company or person's server."
Saying that, and then this bit about choosing moderators, might help.
I may use this when asked how Mastodon works:
Mastodon works like emails does: you can be on anybody's server (the @example.com part) and still communicate fine with people on another company or person's server. When you pick what server to be on (what they call an Instance) you are picking which person or organization you want to decide who and what is banned. You can change it later.
h/t to Alistair Davidson @moh_kohn for the verbiage about how picking a server works
@davidaugust @moh_kohn This explanation is the first time any of this has made sense to me, and I've been here for going on 3 years.
Thank you! 😊🤘🖖
@rauschma nicely done, that makes sense (clearly to us, and hopefully to others).
Have you gotten good responses to that way of characterizing it?
@davidaugust Thanks! It seemed to help my mum (but she is biased 😀).
Many people complain about Mastodon being very different from Twitter—but it never felt that way to me.
So I tried to figure out the core things about Mastodon that people have to understand in order to make sense of it. (Versus overwhelming them with details.)
Mastodon still has some weaknesses (e.g. compared to Bluesky) but it’s best at preventing lock-in & the weaknesses are slowly being fixed: https://2ality.com/2024/11/mastodon-weaknesses.html
As a web developer, I love Mastodon: Since Twitter became X, there are enough web dev people here. I’m happy with the web app – it even has several nice touches where it is better than Twitter. I’m not locked into an ecosystem that is controlled by a single company. That being said, Mastodon still has several major weaknesses. In this blog post, I collect those and explain what’s being done to fix them. It is not meant to be exhaustive: If there is a weakness that affects you and isn’t mentioned here, then please let us know in the comments.
@rauschma working for your mom is a solid datapoint, even if biased 😉
"Mastodon being very different from Twitter—but it never felt that way to me" me either, but I was aware of some of the below-the-hood of twitter, so may have made Mastodon more immediately intelligible to me at first than it is to some.
Not overwhelming folks with details is good.
Preventing lock-in feels key to me, and solves various knock-on problems too.
Gonna read that soon, good weakness are getting attention.
@rauschma good stuff! Flad it is making progress. I like it here and want more of my friends and colleagues to like it here too.
Have you met @smallcircles? They're doing research into some of what may make an open web/social web work well. We were just talking about this sort of thing.
@davidaugust
> I like it here and want more of my friends and colleagues to like it here too.
Same here! Glad to hear others say that too. It’s the social network that locks you in the least (no matter what Bluesky says).
@davidaugust Unless I misunderstand how Bluesky works, it’s even worse than that: If you went to a different server and Bluesky decided not to crawl your PDS (=account) then you couldn’t reply to Bluesky accounts anymore.
Details: https://bsky.app/profile/dr-axel.de/post/3ldyu3xcp222n
1/ Bluesky’s “big world design”: https://bsky.social/about/blog/5-5-2023-federation-architecture Am I getting this wrong? • You can only follow someone if your Relay/AppView crawls their PDS. • They can only see your replies if their R/A crawls your PDS.
@rauschma Oh my. If that is the case, then it seems that the promise of take-it-with-you moderation falls apart if everyone doesn't cooperate (and dedicate digital resources to do so) and keep things connected bilaterally.
Seems the Mastodon moderation/architecture may avoid that pitfall.
@davidaugust Exactly! Bluesky people say it’s easy to leave but I don’t see how that’s true.
I think Mastodon’s choice of the server being a unit of trust (w.r.t. moderation etc.) and only seeing part of the whole social network is the right call: It’s easy to set up new communities etc.
A downside is that there is currently no global discovery (search & algorithms) but work is being done to remedy that (think search engine for the Fediverse): https://www.fediscovery.org
@rauschma "Bluesky people say it’s easy to leave but I don’t see how that’s true" exactly right.
So far, I don't believe anyone has tried or been able to leave Bluesky and take anything with them (that wasn't saved to their own device or something).
I'm eager for when the fediverse solves for some of its downsides (like global search and discovery) and UX can please those who do not care what UX stands for. Many I wish were here are uninterested in learning a UX.
@IceWolf @moh_kohn if the server you migrate away from persists, your old posts may last too.
So yes, you can change who will moderate your feed and posts going forward (and moderation is kind of a present tense thing, so doesn't really exist for old posts anymore, kinda).
You can try to poke holes in a better explanation that may help people adopt things here, but maybe instead of just tearing things down, improve them.
Then I won't feel the need to mute or block you. 😉
That sounds misleading, an instance or server can have several moderators, you don't get to choose.
Maybe community, island,...
@jcast they function as a moderation team, an organization.
Throwing details at people who don’t understand the broad strokes (and frankly don’t care about the details) is part of why adoption of open web standards-based social media and social networks is not happening faster.
It is not misleading, it is true and also simplified.
How do we know: the definition of the word “organization.”
nilognarithmp
David August ❌👑
Court Cantrell does not comply
Axel Rauschmayer
Frost, wolf of winter 🐺🎄
j@mastodon
Dany
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