I really don't get why the concept of mastodon is so confusing.
It's basically twitter/microblogging* with multiple hosts, and you can see posts from other hosts. So instead of just @andrewzah, my handle becomes @andrewzah@<host-I-chose>. You could visualize twitter as @andrewzah@twitter.com, but it's redundant as twitter is the only host. This is basically how email works, no?
The only other difference is federation, so you have two timelines instead of one: the entire** federated timeline, and the local timeline to your host. Plus the timeline of users you follow.
So unlike twitter, the user must decide what host they want to use. Or they can self-host an instance. I'm not sure if it's up to date, but https://instances.social has a wizard for this.
*: IIRC mastodon's default limit is 500 chars, and pleroma's is 2,000.
**: One exception: Hosts can block other hosts. So if you use i.e. mastodon.social, you won't see posts from users on blocked hosts unless you specifically follow them.
Choosing host is more important than it should be. Mainly because hosts are trying to do 2 things at the same time: being identity provider and being some kind of content host in federated environment (moderation etc).
Because of this when you choosing a host, you are investing too much. Their future policy changes etc will effect you, you cannot afaik move to another host. (like moving your email)
When you give people choice, things are much harder. On other platforms we have few choices depending on what you will publish (media type mainly), but here more like topic based separation, which is making things tricky, as we are humans with many different sides.
This is why I recommend self-hosting via pleroma if possible. Mastodon is a huge resource hog compared to pleroma, which can run nicely on a raspberry pi.
But yes, the issue gets outsourced to the user, and you have to trust a random individual instead of an entity like twitter.
Local timelines are at best an attempt to help with content discovery and really too overrated. If the instance is too big, it feels like reading from the firehose and if the instance is too small it is better to just browse the directory and find the profiles that seem interesting to you.
To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership. Unfortunately Mastodon's culture seems to about aggregating around instances with a very loose sense of "community" - e.g, "photographers", "open source developers", "lgbtq allies". To me this is - quite frankly - stupid. Not a day goes by on /r/mastodon where someone asks "is there an instance for X?" thinking that Mastodon instances works like subreddits.
"To me local timelines only make sense if the instance has a very clearly defined group with some kind of shared access, e.g, a company that has an instance for use by its employees, or a club or organization have some kind of membership"
Wow yeah, this makes a lot of sense. It's too bad nodes became associated with niche hobbies or interests.
E.g. a fraternity/sorority that hosts a node would make perfect sense for a local timeline. I guess the only issue is that these organizations aren't permanent. So people would have to migrate, which isn't a thing for twitter or facebook. I know mastodon has a feature for this specifically but I think people would still find it too confusing if people's handles kept on changing.
> people would still find it too if people's handles kept on changing.
Will they? Isn't it the same case with email? I used my University email when I was a student. I have a different company email for different jobs? Those that needed to communicate with me because of the job, I would give them my company email. When my work at company X ended, no one expected me to still message me at raphael@x.
The same with addresses from "email providers". They change less often, but it is still possible. My first account was probably at yahoo, but when gmail came up, I migrated, started to tell people my new address and auto forwarded any message that went to the old email.
"Well", that may be a lot of work to some people. To which the answer is "the only way to have absolute stability regarding your identity is if you own it". You can buy a domain a use a managed email service, you can have a domain and have a managed activitypub service provider.
I really don't get people's confusion over federation. It's just like email.
But with work/university email, you only use it for work/university. It's not a social network. It's not like you are sharing a pic of your cat, and want to keep the replies after you move to another job.
After starting a new job, I don't care about my old job's emails, but my twitter (which is my social network) is still the same
But even then, you can only pick one server per account, which seems asinine in this day and age. I should be able to browse any topic with one identity.
> I should be able to browse any topic with one identity.
You can. Who said otherwise? Where did you get that idea?
An account at Mastodon (or Pleroma/Misskey/Pixelfed/anything) lets you follow anyone you want. There is no restriction about server talking with each other at the protocol level. If the server is federating and its admin is not trigger-happy with federation, you are good to go.
Not every mastodon instance lets you browse their local feed if you're not registered to that instance. Now, it would be interesting if one could subscribe to multiple "local" feeds...
I think you're mistaken. I have permissions to access posts from any server (apart from those that the administrator has blocked, anyway), but that doesn't mean I can view another server's local feed in the Mastodon UI, which is the question at hand.
yeah I replied in sibling thread, mostly topic based instances and federation is the problem. (when identity is bound to host)
When I first saw Mastodon and topic based servers, I was thinking "photography" hosts will federate between each other, "developers" between each other etc. If you are a photography liking developer, you will have 2 accounts, one in "photographers in SF" instance, another one "developers in SF" maybe.
I do agree that because mastodon became focused around specific niches per host, it made things much more complicated for new users. Do I join mastodon.social? Do I join bsd.network? Do I join writing.exchange? Etc.
What I realized was I should have been asking: Do I care about the federated timeline? Do I care if my host blocks other hosts at random? Do I care if my host allows certain things (I.e. pornography with or without a NSFW tag, or at all). Do I know who the host is and can I trust them with my private messages and to not randomly ban me?
I personally like seeing the federated timeline as I have discovered some accounts through it. But my host absolutely needs to do some filtering because some hosts will allow -anything-. I never really found much use for the local timeline.
So for me, hosting was clearly the best option. I do try to get my friends to consider joining the fediverse, and I offer hosting to them to solve this issue.
I have a single user pleroma instance and I don't check local or federated timelines.
I think I even disabled them.
If I want to discover new content or users I go to the instances that interest me and explore their timelines.
Actually that was exactly my point, you managed to separate identity and content by using your own instance. But for average user this will be pretty hard.
It's a cultural issue, not a technical one. When Mastodon started to take off, one of differentiating factors was about the sort of people they wanted to attract. It's very easy to market to a tribe and appeal to their identity, so it started to stick.
One of my goals with communick is to get rid of this idea, actually. I try to make the point that an instance does not say anything about who you are or who you should follow.
A lot of people can put themselves onto the Fediverse with little more than a WordPress site and an ActivityPub plugin. You're right though, it goes beyond an average user's technical capability to do so at the moment.
Perhaps Automattic (the current owner of Tumblr) can shoehorn the ActivityPub protocol into Tumblr and find a way to market that system to your average Joe.
Not really, because the account is less coupled to the topics. I have one reddit account even though I'm in a bunch of different subreddits (and I'm not even in the subreddit that I originally joined reddit for). I have one discord account even though I'm in a bunch of different discords (and even have different usernames in different ones).
There is only the choice of whether to use the service or not. If you get banned for wrongthink on Twitter, it does not immediately affect you on Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook only ban the more extreme or inconvenient forms of wrongthink. Mastodon servers on the other hand often are Subreddit style echochambers.
I am questioning the presupposition that one chooses to make any account at all.
Using your analogy:
I don't need to create an account to view a subreddit or reddit.
I don't need to create an account to view federated instances.
When I publish content on any social network I am always thinking about who it is intended for.
I don't post the same things on Facebook that I would on Instagram, for example.
Users have to make the same choice of what to publish with any other social media service.
The choosing host part is exactly why I want to emphasize that nothing has changed in regards to hosting.
Just like before someone needs to host the "message board" and that someone needs to be relied upon.
I often see posts on fediverse related subreddits of people who are dismayed because their instance admin did something. They expect every instance to be a "Mastodon instance" and follow some sort of rules.
People need to be reminded of the internet that was. Before Facebook and Twitter started to run it for them.
Mastodon is only a little confusing (it's inherently going to be a bit more confusing than Twitter, which was the GP's main point). The complaints of the OP and much of the thread are more related to Twitter and microblogging being kind of, well, terrible. The "us versus them" quality is magnified if Mastodon consists of Twitter refugees. Twitter is moderated by the way the whole world can hear you when you scream - and that does not seem to moderate it well. Equating these constructs with BBSes seems kind of absurd. BBSes are the opposite are far as "controllabillity" goes - of course. You can moderate them any way you wish, including no moderate or even moderation intended to set people against each other (if you're truly evil). But the BBS or web forum belongs to someone and has this flexibility.
It's basically twitter/microblogging* with multiple hosts, and you can see posts from other hosts. So instead of just @andrewzah, my handle becomes @andrewzah@<host-I-chose>. You could visualize twitter as @andrewzah@twitter.com, but it's redundant as twitter is the only host. This is basically how email works, no?
The only other difference is federation, so you have two timelines instead of one: the entire** federated timeline, and the local timeline to your host. Plus the timeline of users you follow.
So unlike twitter, the user must decide what host they want to use. Or they can self-host an instance. I'm not sure if it's up to date, but https://instances.social has a wizard for this.
*: IIRC mastodon's default limit is 500 chars, and pleroma's is 2,000.
**: One exception: Hosts can block other hosts. So if you use i.e. mastodon.social, you won't see posts from users on blocked hosts unless you specifically follow them.