Mastodon

[danbrotherston]

I'm confused...you think the average person doesn't understand that they (having a gmail account) can email someone with a hotmail account or having a rogers telephone can phone someone having a bell phone?

The point I was making is not a specific workflow but an understanding of the concept. People learned a specific workflow on twitter, they can learn the same workflow on Mastodon.

I think they understand they can do those things, but no, I don't think they understand the underlying concepts. I don't think the thought process goes beyond "I have email, they have email, therefore we can email". They certainly don't think "Google and Microsoft host mail servers and frontends to access them, which can communicated with each other via shared standards and protocols, and they allow me to sign up to make use of servers they specifically host".

That's all people have to know to use mastodon. It's exactly analogous to using email.

"Constant incompatible forks"...it's only confusing if you look at the history. At this point Gab, Parler, and CS are all entirely separate things, nobody is confused about Twitter because Instagram exists.

If the history is confusing, then at one point the present was also confusing. This is just the nature of open source (and to an extent distributed/federated) technologies, especially ones used to host divisive topics. It happened in the past and will happen again in some future present, and it undermines the stability and wholeness required by certain types of social networks like Twitter.

I don't think it was confusing in the past, largely I believe because Mastodon has been smart with their use of their trademark. Gab and Parler never used the Mastodon trademark so for average people it was never associated in the first place.

Yes, it could be in the future that some Mastodon branded instances get blocked, but I think that's not going to be a huge hurdle to learn. People understand spam message filtering in email.

"And be honest"....*I* am looking for alternatives for many reasons. Most importantly, I don't think our social spaces should be owned and controlled by an asshole billionaire, or even a robot billionaire...or even a benevolent billionaire.

Agreed, though Musk's purchase wouldn't have been that tipping point for me...

I've often wished there was more discussion around certain platforms or types of platforms being considered a utility, and regulated as such for neutrality's sake, even if I'm not convinced it will be possible in the end.

Haha...

Well, I think we agree the current situation is very bad, where one asshole controls the whole thing.

I'm not opposed to regulating things, but my ideal situation is not a well regulated centralised system (although I still prefer that to now) but a distributed (ideally true P2P) network of services where individuals have more local control their own feeds.

I also think this (at least in the form that Mastodon is in now) limits...'virality' of the network which I think is a good thing. It should limit the corrosive effects of money by limiting the value of "influencers".

Most acutely because it seems quite likely Twitter will cease to exist in it's current form in the very near future. Whether that means actual bankruptcy, complete failure of their infrastructure, further inundation with right wing extremists and hate groups through permissive policies and the CEOs own fanclub, I don't know, but there are a lot of threats right now and a backup plan is good to have.

In the days since my post I've come more around to the idea that Musk could run it into the ground, with some of his tech related statements... Maybe he's just showboating for his ignorant fans, I don't know.

Yeah, hard to know how it will end up. As much as I want to see Musk fail, for the sake of all the little people under him, I hope that things don't go too badly...stabilising into a third tier social network at 1/10th it's original value is probably the best case scenario in my mind.