Ned's spot on. The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join, whether I should start my own server, or if I join someone else's server, how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or even not possible at all?
Definitely. This is a great post that helps explain to technical folks why Mastodon is not (and will never be) a replacement for Twitter, which I say as a Mastodon user and fan. If something has a chance to displace Twitter, it'll need to be as dead-simple to use (like Hive¹).
> The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join…
If you're looking for an opinionated answer to this question by someone who's just gone through this, for HN readers I can also recommend the instance mentioned in the article: hachyderm.io. There are a lot of tech and otherwise-interesting people there, and it's run by Kris Nóva². Her most recent articles on Medium talk about running an instance as a serious endeavor.
> …if I join someone else's server, how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or even not possible at all?
Kris's most recent post, "Experimenting with Federation and Migrating Accounts"³, goes into detail on how this works in practice.
Thanks, @CharlesW. I'm familiar with Kris and follow her on Twitter, and see a lot of people have opted to join her Mastodon server, which is great, but her explanation of what happened when she tried to migrate her account from one server to another, where she even controlled both, points to the weakness in the fundamental Mastodon design that makes it a non-starter for me.
Being able to export all of your data (posts, followers, following, blocks/mutes, etc.) and to import it into another server MUST be table stakes at this point. Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't repeat itself.
I'll keep watching from the sidelines and see if the fundamental issues get resolved. It certainly will be interesting to see how things play out, that's for sure!
There is another threat which is more a problem in my opinion.
Imagine a future where everyone has moved to mastadon, and 1 mastadon server has done a good job of improving the flow and UX to bring in the users. Years later, when everyone is comfortable, this becomes the 'default' because its easy and their policies appeal to main stream users.
The big server sells user metadata and shows ads, and has money to invest in AI moderation and legal compliance with data privacy & anti-abuse laws. Maybe they lobby to increase regulation in a way that they can more easily comply with than the little guys.
Eventually the others wither away into only niche use. Their unwillingness to sell user data gives them thin margins for lawyers and compliance dealings. The big player enacts anti-spam / anti-abuse policies that happen to ban the small servers a lot while trusting themselves a lot. Eventually you are in a situation where you CAN have an account on any mastadon server, in theory, but for your posts to not be flagged as spam, it is more reliable to use the 1 big server everyone uses.
We have seen this starting to happen with email (gmail/msft/apple) for example.
What is the point of all the work to move to a federated system, if there is no force to counter a few players becoming dominant and killing the rest, converting the system back into a few big corporate players?
Open protocols and standards can be used as a trap to lure us in. I'm old enough to remember when facebook used to publish RSS feeds, which was a primitive federating mechanism. Once they got big enough, they stopped.
> Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't repeat itself.
I don't see how you can come to this conclusion. Twitter is not a protocol, is a corporation with a profit-motive, and sees itself as the town square of the internet with its design geared toward this function.
Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely what makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter emigrants.
Are there other protocols that fix some of ActivityPub's design flaws? Yes, like nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol. But ActivityPub, being an open protocol, can also be massaged into a better one by its community.
Personally, I've found my corner of Mastodon to be a much kinder place than Twitter perhaps because it does not profess to be the town square of the internet nor pursues that status.
Ultimately, I think what we're seeing here is the transparent lie sold to us by Meta and Twitter and Instagram: that social media superapps that try to tie the world together are not forces of good to unite but ultimately weapons that serve to divide it. We are not equipped as a species for the cacophonous screams of billions, only the Bodhisattva of compassion Kuan-Yin, She Who Hears the Cries of the of World, can do this, and she arguably doesn't exist.
So yes, you are at the mercy of whatever server mods you happen to drift to on Mastodon but you are not powerless, like on Twitter.
> Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely what makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter emigrants.
A protocol has no inherent value. Its value comes from its application. And, Mastodon, as one of ActivityPub's applications, is nothing better than Twitter fractured into many smaller islands of Twitter: instead of upsetting Elon and getting the boot, if you upset the Mastodon server operator you happen to choose, you run the same exact risk of being deported off that particular island. If you're going to subject yourself to the whims of a dictator, you might as well stay on Twitter and reap the benefits of the larger network.
You've ignored all of my salient points. Of course Mastodon offers significant advantages for all of the reasons I just described. Of course a protocol has inherent value. Its value is inhered by giving users the option to walk away whenever they want or implement their own server.
You've completely ignored the arrest of user behavior and audience that happens when a single proprietary application is allowed to own the social sphere of the public.
The whims of a dictator become a lot less impactful when users can just walk away. The consequences are massively different when the entire captive audience is on one platform and feels they must remain because there is no other option with critical mass. With federation, critical mass is spread out over the protocol, yes a value inhered in the protocol itself.
That last point is a doozy. Mastodon servers can be as bad as subreddits with power tripping mods, and you don’t necessarily know that until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, just like on reddit.
And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts.
Going from one server (Twitter) to multiple smaller servers doesn’t seem to go far enough on the axis to address major issues that Twitter has. e.g. you still don’t “own” your content.
> [...] until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, [...] And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts.
Exactly. This is the critical flaw in Mastodon's design. It does not solve the single biggest flaw in Twitter (or any other typical platform) design, where the platform operator owns the network, and not the author/user.
This is why I won't bother investing my own personal time and effort in joining anyone else's server, given how the current design is implemented.
It's sad that BitTorrent has now existed for 21 years, and still no one has built a social media content distribution network on top of it. I would have done it but I don't have the motivation to do it alone, as it would tilt control away from the platform operators who require that control in order to monetize the platform to make it worth the investment.
> And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts.
Well, you pretty much can't migrate your posts anyway even if you're moving without being nuked. But if you get nuked, you probably can't move your followers either which would suck.
Well, I suppose if you migrate your account from Twitter to Twitter, you'll probably keep your followers and posts. Then again, given its current state, I'd not be inclined to put money on that.
> You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts).
That's what I thought based on what I've read so far, thanks for confirming.
Unless and until that's fixed, if I finally see enough value in joining Mastodon, I will have to do so using my own server where I have full access to all my content.
You can export all your content, including posts, but Mastodon doesn't support directly importing posts, so you need either a (very) friendly admin or your own server if you want to import it somewhere new.
Yeah this is probably a needed feature. There are some good philosophical objections to post imports, but they’re overwhelmed by practical arguments for it. it’s a solvable problem.
Absolutely agree. I think solutions will come, but they may well come as an extension or fork first until it's pointless for the core developers to resist.
It's particularly idiotic because the Activities in the export are all signed, so an importing server just need to do a webfinger and profile lookup, and can then validate all of the posts. Of course you can still fake them, but if you show a "moved from <origin instance>" on them, that's really all you need to do - moves from, say, mastodon.social would be trustworthy, moves from some small instance would not.
But even that can be fixed with tamper proof timestamps and signing the whole archive, and in any case you can validate this against the public API because it remains accessible on the origin server (at least for some time after the initial move, I don't know how long).
And yet, you somehow managed to pick HN over reddit over TikTok or slack or discord or 100 other options. Or maybe all of the above.
I'll never get the hand wringing over missing out on posts on some other server. There's tweets and reddits and tiktoks all over the place you'll never see. The lesson should be to make peace with that, not try to find them all.
The primary UX between servers is the "local feed." This is a feed dedicated to all posts within the server. You can't really access that feed from outside of a server. That's pretty much it. You can follow people on other servers, at-metnion, etc.
Many servers allow their Local Timeline to be browsed by anyone. From the server's home page, click the "Local" button to the top-right. If you find a person or post you want to interact with, simply copy and paste its URL into the search bar of your app or home server.
I guess my month-long moratorium on bothering to contribute to any Fediverse-related conversation on HN needs to be maintained for a bit longer. Change is painful for many, particularly when they didn't think of it, or can't profit from it.
This is the right answer. All the questions about moderation, resources, choice and whatever will disappear and you'll be part of the Fediverse like anyone else.
I wonder how easy it is for a small instance to get overwhelmed quickly, though.
One of my responses to Nova got boosted by her, and my media storage and database size immediately spiked (600MiB to 1.3GiB and 20MiB to 42MiB). Requests went from none to 20/sec, just by that triggering more people to favorite and boost.
I imagine if I ever manage to post something profound that someone with even greater influence happens to like, my server will be doomed.
20 requests/sec is absolutely nothing for a server in 2022. Even if you have many relationships, any individual server will handle the load without any fuss. Worth that can happen is a few minutes in the propagation of messages, which is not exactly a big problem. Seriously, there is no technical reasons we don't self-host; only "cultural" ones (it's hard, it's work, it's painful, and such)
