I moved from Google+ to my own Mastodon instance, hosted by masto.host. Are there other "complete hosting services" for Mastodon? I prefer paying few Euros a month instead of having to keep all my server components up-to-date myself.
What Google plus readers expect from a social network interface is a bit different from what Twitter/Mastodon users expect. One of the main difference is that in G+, there is a clear visual distinction between the original post and the comments that are posted below it. Mastodon, in the other hand, being inspired by Twitter, shows everything in the same visual style.
How do you think this is important, and how is it going to affect the user experience for a G+-accustomed user in Mastodon. What are your thoughts about such differences, and how important they are. When inviting people from G+ to Mastodon, can you think of any plans for Mastodon to appeal to both crowds?
I'm interested in knowing more about the development side of things. Is Mastodon pretty stable at this point? Are there any particular features or projects you'd like to tackle on it? How many core vs casual code contributors do you have at this point? I've watched Mastodon over the last 2? years or so and it's done really well. I particularly like the interface.
Given the events around Wil Wheaton's experience with Mastodon (setting completely aside for the moment any side-taking here), what thoughts do you have about enabling individuals and administrators to deal with similar blowups in the future? It's not unreasonable to predict deliberate attempts in a similar vein to run people off, etc ( after watching FB, twitter, Russia bots and so on ).
Masoud Abkenar It's the classical divide between facebook-style platforms and twitter-style platforms. Here you have your own page, and when people comment on it, it's like they leave a message on your wall. And since it's your wall, you get to delete the messages, and they don't show up anywhere else. On Mastodon the messages always belong to the author only. So somebody who starts a conversation cannot fully control it for everybody. There's pros and cons to that. I think the benefits of that approach is that the thread author cannot shut down legitimate criticism (imagine an antivaxx person deleting all replies that prove them wrong), but the downside is a bit less control. If a message chain is abused the moderators of your server can still step in and delete stuff (assuming you aren't the owner of your own server, anyway!)
Visually I think the differences are not so important, because various apps and webapps could make it look very similar to what you have on Google+. But I think even more fundamentally, because Mastodon is built on a versatile protocol like ActivityPub, you can choose software that isn't Mastodon and fits your use case better, but still be part of the same network where all the Mastodon users are. For example, Hubzilla might look more familiar to Google+ users, even so far as supporting circles, if I remember correctly.
Eugen Rochko Thanks for your thoughtful response. I never thought of the difference as something that goes beyond the interface. But you are right. Anyways, keep up your great work on #Mastodon :)
Eugen Rochko are there any plans to build a Group functionality into Mastodon? G+MM is an example of a group ("Community") on G+, that might be a nice-to-have.
Cindy Brown Patches need to pass through automated tests and through code review by a trusted contributor before they can be accepted into the code base. Before every major release, the code is tested in a "release candidate" phase to ensure no regressions have been introduced. For example, right now version 2.6.0 is in release candidate phase.
There are over 500 casual contributors, though most of them are one line changes. I'd say there are around 20 consistent, trusted contributors other than me (I work on Mastodon full-time)
DL Keur You can try to search your e-mail inbox for "Mastodon". I recommend using a password manager to keep track of services you sign up on. Personally I like KeePass.
1. How usable is Mastodon for non-nerd types who have neither the interest nor the skills to maintain our own servers, etc.? Many of us are looking for a network that simply works as well as G+ does, without our needing the technical knowledge to make it work.
2. The large G+ photographer communities need the ability to post high-quality images; some of us will likely continue to use Google Photos to host our photos. Is that doable on Mastodon? Everything I've seen so far suggests it's more like Twitter than G+.
Edward Morbius In the absence of a real group feature, people have repurposed the "local timeline" (a firehose feed of all public posts originating from the server you are on) into, essentially, a group, with Mastodon servers being started around shared interests. In version 2.6.0 of Mastodon, which will be released soon, I have added improved support for limited-audience posts (think circles), though without the ability to post to such circles yet (it's more about supporting such functionality in Hubzilla). This might or might not simplify adding a real group feature down the road.
It's not a straightforward task because no ActivityPub software has implemented groups yet, so it's uncharted territory. And even though GNU social had groups using OStatus, I don't think that was a good experience. So, I do not want to promise or guarantee groups, but I am looking into it.
Donna Buckles Because of Mastodon's decentralized nature, users are spread between smaller servers with independent groups of moderators. This means the ratio of moderators to people who they are responsible for is higher. You know who to go to for help. Because of this, it's also much easier to notice when somebody shady signs up on your server. Admins, as a rule of thumb, do not want to host spammers or people who spread disinformation. As for Mastodon's abuse related features, I have written up a detailed post about it: blog.joinmastodon.org - Cage the Mastodon
Eugen Rochko That info is on my computer network. I was hoping I wouldn't have to go sifting through all those saved emails for it. Ah, well. When I fire that system up later today, maybe I'll open my email client and do a search.
Eugen Rochko Do you know of examples of people working Mastodon into publishing systems with blogs, Mastodon, and maybe a social endpoint (Facebook, Hubzilla, etc.), or better yet, tools for making that straightforward?
I can think of a lot of people who've been looking for that kind of a system without having to jump through hoops, or even necessarily use a browser -- push from Git via a static site generator, say.
Cindy Brown We have improved reporting tools in response to the Wil Wheaton incident, making it harder to overwhelm admins with fraudulent reports. As a recap, Wil Wheaton, who was on mastodon.cloud, was getting reported from other servers with a very high frequency, and the admin of mastodon.cloud, whose native language is not English, contacted Wheaton inquiring if maybe it would be best for Wheaton to switch servers, which Wheaton understood as getting suspended, upon which he decided to leave social media altogether. The story could have had a different ending. For example, multiple other admins I know have offered to host Wheaton's account. Wheaton could also have hosted his own server, making it virtually impossible for anyone but himself to drive him off of it.
Eugen Rochko One of my takeaways from the WilW incident was that hosting celebrities is different, and almost certainly requires at a minimum coordination and awareness with the admin. Much could have been handled better.
Celebrities are different from you and me (well, me). They know people. LOTS of people.
And even more know them.
Birdland early on could only handle one celebrity tweeting at a time.
Edward Morbius There is Plume: an ActivityPub client (the same underlying protocol that Mastodon uses) for blog posts: https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume Good part is, any social network that uses ActivityPub is interoperable with any other one. You can follow, like, and repost videos from a #PeerTube server, or images from a friend with a #PixelFed account, or blog posts that somebody wrote on their #Plume instance, all without leaving your Mastodon interface. This is because all these networks use the same protocol which is endorsed by W3C.
Present plan is git + markdown + Pelican + GitLab.
Having a title + blurb kicked out to Mastodon would be slick, the less work involved the better. A unique-but-sensible tracking hashtag (for trackbacks / comments) would be a nice extra touch. This is what I'm dreaming of.
Pat Kight I do not think technical knowledge is a requirement for using Mastodon. It simply has a higher range of what you can get out of it if you have technical knowledge, but it "just works" for everybody. It has a large community of people who are not involved in software, from artists and writers to sex workers.
Mastodon uses higher quality on thumbnails and does not put artifacts on images, however, Mastodon does have an upper bound on the size of images it stores - 1280 square pixels. This does not stop photographer communities from forming on Mastodon though: photog.social and mstdn.tokyocameraclub.com for example.
You might be interested in Pixelfed, which is a project that is part of the Mastodon network (so people from both can interact and follow each other), but is oriented towards photo sharing. So even if you find Mastodon itself inadequate for your needs, you have options.
Edward Morbius There's Plume, there's write.as, and I know there's a WordPress plugin too. At the end of the day you could also use a Mastodon command-line client if you just want to automate posting from a real Mastodon account.
1) does mastodon have lists like twitter? 2) if I want to view a local feed of a mastodon server that isn't accepting new members, can I do it from another server?
Eugen Rochko Thanks, that's useful information. Not sure Mastodon will work for my purposes, but I'll continue to listen and investigate. As others have said, there's no rush to find a new social home; we have months to make our decisions.
Simon Butcher Mastodon lists are the only way I can cope with the flow. I don't follow indiscriminately, but I've ended up following a lot of people and profiles (some bots and relays).
I use an 'A, B, C, ...' model, with a few named lists. The lettered ones are by priority, and I try to keep A pretty limited. There's 'Voluble' (for people who ... just post a lot), an Admins list (mostly from the WilW incident), and one of Press/Media types. Those are good for reading from, you cannot send to just a list. That's either public, followers, or named recipients.
Hello, Eugen Rochko . As I am totally new to Mastodon, how would you introduce your network to people like me? What would be the appeal of Mastodon and what are some important points that would make me use it?
Pat Kight Technically, from a user perspective, Mastodon's been rock solid. The community is small relative to Twitter, but engaging, and I've definitely found a crowd I like. I can't compare usage to Twitter, but it's pretty straightforward.
The one thing I had issues with early on was distinguishing local links, presented through my client, with the web-accessible public links. This shows up in other federated systems (like Diaspora) where content doesn't always have the same URL when seen from different hosts, instances, pods, etc. That's about the only real learning curve I can remember.
Filip H.F. Slagter There isn't so much you can extract into an ActivityPub-related gem because most things are going to be your business logic with a thin serialization and authentication layer. For example HTTP Signatures only takes maybe 10 lines of code to implement. I use oj for fast JSON parsing, ActiveModel Serializers to convert database models into JSON, and HTTP.rb for HTTP requests, but none of that is specific to ActivityPub or ActivityStreams. One library that is specific is called json-ld and we use it for RDF normalization which is necessary for JSON LD-Signatures. That is an advanced and optional functionality though, it allows some nice stuff but you don't have to mess with it if you don't want to.
Eugen Rochko btw, are there plans for Mastodon to implement something like Hubzilla's approach to Nomadic identities? Also, do you know of any turn-key or hosted solutions for Comment systems that use federated identities? i.e., something I could add to blog posts that would allow people with any Federation or Fediverse account to comment directly, and would list all those comments (preferably threaded) on that article page? So, something like Disqus, but then federated? I'm guessing that if I had to implement it myself, the blog post would have to be published as an Article ActivityPub item, and my server would have to have its own Inbox it would process?
That's also a good one: is there a way to subscribe to further comments to a toot on Mastodon, without actually leaving a reply yourself? Unless I overlooked that feature, any plans on adding support for that? It's something that has bugged me about GPlus from the start, and for which I've sent in several feedback reports in the past, when I was still hopeful that they were actually still listening to user feedback.
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I moved from Google+ to my own Mastodon instance, hosted by masto.host. Are there other "complete hosting services" for Mastodon? I prefer paying few Euros a month instead of having to keep all my server components up-to-date myself.
ReplyDeleteFrantišek Fuka masto.host is the only fully managed Mastodon hosting provider known to me at this moment
ReplyDeleteWhat Google plus readers expect from a social network interface is a bit different from what Twitter/Mastodon users expect. One of the main difference is that in G+, there is a clear visual distinction between the original post and the comments that are posted below it. Mastodon, in the other hand, being inspired by Twitter, shows everything in the same visual style.
ReplyDeleteHow do you think this is important, and how is it going to affect the user experience for a G+-accustomed user in Mastodon. What are your thoughts about such differences, and how important they are. When inviting people from G+ to Mastodon, can you think of any plans for Mastodon to appeal to both crowds?
I'm interested in knowing more about the development side of things. Is Mastodon pretty stable at this point? Are there any particular features or projects you'd like to tackle on it? How many core vs casual code contributors do you have at this point? I've watched Mastodon over the last 2? years or so and it's done really well. I particularly like the interface.
ReplyDeleteI am interested in knowing about your policies, controls and tools for managing harassment, abuse, and disinformation.
ReplyDeleteGiven the events around Wil Wheaton's experience with Mastodon (setting completely aside for the moment any side-taking here), what thoughts do you have about enabling individuals and administrators to deal with similar blowups in the future? It's not unreasonable to predict deliberate attempts in a similar vein to run people off, etc ( after watching FB, twitter, Russia bots and so on ).
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko Welcome and thanks for showing up to answer questions from us!
ReplyDeleteMasoud Abkenar It's the classical divide between facebook-style platforms and twitter-style platforms. Here you have your own page, and when people comment on it, it's like they leave a message on your wall. And since it's your wall, you get to delete the messages, and they don't show up anywhere else. On Mastodon the messages always belong to the author only. So somebody who starts a conversation cannot fully control it for everybody. There's pros and cons to that. I think the benefits of that approach is that the thread author cannot shut down legitimate criticism (imagine an antivaxx person deleting all replies that prove them wrong), but the downside is a bit less control. If a message chain is abused the moderators of your server can still step in and delete stuff (assuming you aren't the owner of your own server, anyway!)
ReplyDeleteVisually I think the differences are not so important, because various apps and webapps could make it look very similar to what you have on Google+. But I think even more fundamentally, because Mastodon is built on a versatile protocol like ActivityPub, you can choose software that isn't Mastodon and fits your use case better, but still be part of the same network where all the Mastodon users are. For example, Hubzilla might look more familiar to Google+ users, even so far as supporting circles, if I remember correctly.
Eugen Rochko Thanks for your thoughtful response. I never thought of the difference as something that goes beyond the interface. But you are right. Anyways, keep up your great work on #Mastodon :)
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko are there any plans to build a Group functionality into Mastodon? G+MM is an example of a group ("Community") on G+, that might be a nice-to-have.
ReplyDeleteI've been a member of mastodon since right after it opened, but I can't remember through which service I signed up. Sigh.
ReplyDeleteCindy Brown Patches need to pass through automated tests and through code review by a trusted contributor before they can be accepted into the code base. Before every major release, the code is tested in a "release candidate" phase to ensure no regressions have been introduced. For example, right now version 2.6.0 is in release candidate phase.
ReplyDeleteThere are over 500 casual contributors, though most of them are one line changes. I'd say there are around 20 consistent, trusted contributors other than me (I work on Mastodon full-time)
DL Keur You can try to search your e-mail inbox for "Mastodon". I recommend using a password manager to keep track of services you sign up on. Personally I like KeePass.
ReplyDelete1. How usable is Mastodon for non-nerd types who have neither the interest nor the skills to maintain our own servers, etc.? Many of us are looking for a network that simply works as well as G+ does, without our needing the technical knowledge to make it work.
ReplyDelete2. The large G+ photographer communities need the ability to post high-quality images; some of us will likely continue to use Google Photos to host our photos. Is that doable on Mastodon? Everything I've seen so far suggests it's more like Twitter than G+.
Edward Morbius In the absence of a real group feature, people have repurposed the "local timeline" (a firehose feed of all public posts originating from the server you are on) into, essentially, a group, with Mastodon servers being started around shared interests. In version 2.6.0 of Mastodon, which will be released soon, I have added improved support for limited-audience posts (think circles), though without the ability to post to such circles yet (it's more about supporting such functionality in Hubzilla). This might or might not simplify adding a real group feature down the road.
ReplyDeleteIt's not a straightforward task because no ActivityPub software has implemented groups yet, so it's uncharted territory. And even though GNU social had groups using OStatus, I don't think that was a good experience. So, I do not want to promise or guarantee groups, but I am looking into it.
Donna Buckles Because of Mastodon's decentralized nature, users are spread between smaller servers with independent groups of moderators. This means the ratio of moderators to people who they are responsible for is higher. You know who to go to for help. Because of this, it's also much easier to notice when somebody shady signs up on your server. Admins, as a rule of thumb, do not want to host spammers or people who spread disinformation. As for Mastodon's abuse related features, I have written up a detailed post about it: blog.joinmastodon.org - Cage the Mastodon
ReplyDeleteThank you, Eugen Rochko
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko That info is on my computer network. I was hoping I wouldn't have to go sifting through all those saved emails for it. Ah, well. When I fire that system up later today, maybe I'll open my email client and do a search.
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko Do you know of examples of people working Mastodon into publishing systems with blogs, Mastodon, and maybe a social endpoint (Facebook, Hubzilla, etc.), or better yet, tools for making that straightforward?
ReplyDeleteI can think of a lot of people who've been looking for that kind of a system without having to jump through hoops, or even necessarily use a browser -- push from Git via a static site generator, say.
Cindy Brown We have improved reporting tools in response to the Wil Wheaton incident, making it harder to overwhelm admins with fraudulent reports. As a recap, Wil Wheaton, who was on mastodon.cloud, was getting reported from other servers with a very high frequency, and the admin of mastodon.cloud, whose native language is not English, contacted Wheaton inquiring if maybe it would be best for Wheaton to switch servers, which Wheaton understood as getting suspended, upon which he decided to leave social media altogether. The story could have had a different ending. For example, multiple other admins I know have offered to host Wheaton's account. Wheaton could also have hosted his own server, making it virtually impossible for anyone but himself to drive him off of it.
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko One of my takeaways from the WilW incident was that hosting celebrities is different, and almost certainly requires at a minimum coordination and awareness with the admin. Much could have been handled better.
ReplyDeleteCelebrities are different from you and me (well, me). They know people. LOTS of people.
And even more know them.
Birdland early on could only handle one celebrity tweeting at a time.
Edward Morbius There is Plume: an ActivityPub client (the same underlying protocol that Mastodon uses) for blog posts: https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume
ReplyDeleteGood part is, any social network that uses ActivityPub is interoperable with any other one. You can follow, like, and repost videos from a #PeerTube server, or images from a friend with a #PixelFed account, or blog posts that somebody wrote on their #Plume instance, all without leaving your Mastodon interface. This is because all these networks use the same protocol which is endorsed by W3C.
Okay. Just resigned up for your instance instead of battling my way through a million emails. ...Wow. G+ does NOT like mastodon UIDs, does it?
ReplyDeleteMasoud Abkenar That's on my to-look-at list.
ReplyDeletePresent plan is git + markdown + Pelican + GitLab.
Having a title + blurb kicked out to Mastodon would be slick, the less work involved the better. A unique-but-sensible tracking hashtag (for trackbacks / comments) would be a nice extra touch. This is what I'm dreaming of.
Edit: Looks as if Plume's already running on GitHub (largely similar to GitLab hosting): https://plume-org.github.io/Plume/
Pat Kight I do not think technical knowledge is a requirement for using Mastodon. It simply has a higher range of what you can get out of it if you have technical knowledge, but it "just works" for everybody. It has a large community of people who are not involved in software, from artists and writers to sex workers.
ReplyDeleteMastodon uses higher quality on thumbnails and does not put artifacts on images, however, Mastodon does have an upper bound on the size of images it stores - 1280 square pixels. This does not stop photographer communities from forming on Mastodon though: photog.social and mstdn.tokyocameraclub.com for example.
You might be interested in Pixelfed, which is a project that is part of the Mastodon network (so people from both can interact and follow each other), but is oriented towards photo sharing. So even if you find Mastodon itself inadequate for your needs, you have options.
Masoud Abkenar Also, while you're at it, a pointer at the ActivityPub protocols / tools is something I've been meaning to track down for #PlexodusWiki
ReplyDeleteEdward Morbius There's Plume, there's write.as, and I know there's a WordPress plugin too. At the end of the day you could also use a Mastodon command-line client if you just want to automate posting from a real Mastodon account.
ReplyDelete1) does mastodon have lists like twitter? 2) if I want to view a local feed of a mastodon server that isn't accepting new members, can I do it from another server?
ReplyDeleteSimon Butcher Yes, Mastodon does have lists like Twitter. The local feed of a Mastodon server is sometimes shown on the frontpage. If not, there's a tool for it: http://www.unmung.com/mastoview?url=mastodon.social&view=local
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko Thanks, that's useful information. Not sure Mastodon will work for my purposes, but I'll continue to listen and investigate. As others have said, there's no rush to find a new social home; we have months to make our decisions.
ReplyDeleteSimon Butcher Mastodon lists are the only way I can cope with the flow. I don't follow indiscriminately, but I've ended up following a lot of people and profiles (some bots and relays).
ReplyDeleteI use an 'A, B, C, ...' model, with a few named lists. The lettered ones are by priority, and I try to keep A pretty limited. There's 'Voluble' (for people who ... just post a lot), an Admins list (mostly from the WilW incident), and one of Press/Media types. Those are good for reading from, you cannot send to just a list. That's either public, followers, or named recipients.
Hello, Eugen Rochko . As I am totally new to Mastodon, how would you introduce your network to people like me? What would be the appeal of Mastodon and what are some important points that would make me use it?
ReplyDeletePat Kight Technically, from a user perspective, Mastodon's been rock solid. The community is small relative to Twitter, but engaging, and I've definitely found a crowd I like. I can't compare usage to Twitter, but it's pretty straightforward.
ReplyDeleteThe one thing I had issues with early on was distinguishing local links, presented through my client, with the web-accessible public links. This shows up in other federated systems (like Diaspora) where content doesn't always have the same URL when seen from different hosts, instances, pods, etc. That's about the only real learning curve I can remember.
Eugen Rochko How are you for time -- we're over the original by a bit, planning to be around or do you have commitments elsewhere?
ReplyDeleteFrantišek Fuka Thanks for the tip about masto.host. Have been wishing for something in the federated space that looks like a product vs. a project.
ReplyDeleteJuha Lindfors So far it works flawlessly. See kompost.cz - Kompost.cz
ReplyDeleteMeris Gutošić I would maybe show them this video, as it's got cute elephants and explains the basics: youtube.com - What is Mastodon?
ReplyDeleteI also like to invoke the analogy to e-mail.
Eugen Rochko for small standalone projects working with ActivityPub and ActivityStreams, which RubyGems and project examples would you recommend?
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter There isn't so much you can extract into an ActivityPub-related gem because most things are going to be your business logic with a thin serialization and authentication layer. For example HTTP Signatures only takes maybe 10 lines of code to implement. I use oj for fast JSON parsing, ActiveModel Serializers to convert database models into JSON, and HTTP.rb for HTTP requests, but none of that is specific to ActivityPub or ActivityStreams. One library that is specific is called json-ld and we use it for RDF normalization which is necessary for JSON LD-Signatures. That is an advanced and optional functionality though, it allows some nice stuff but you don't have to mess with it if you don't want to.
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko thanks! I'll definitely look into it. :)
ReplyDeleteFilip H.F. Slagter Oh also check out these tutorials I wrote on a basic ActivityPub implementation: Part 1 blog.joinmastodon.org - How to implement a basic ActivityPub server and Part 2 https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/07/how-to-make-friends-and-verify-requests/
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko thanks, that looks exactly like what I was looking for to get started!
ReplyDeleteEugen Rochko btw, are there plans for Mastodon to implement something like Hubzilla's approach to Nomadic identities?
ReplyDeleteAlso, do you know of any turn-key or hosted solutions for Comment systems that use federated identities? i.e., something I could add to blog posts that would allow people with any Federation or Fediverse account to comment directly, and would list all those comments (preferably threaded) on that article page? So, something like Disqus, but then federated?
I'm guessing that if I had to implement it myself, the blog post would have to be published as an Article ActivityPub item, and my server would have to have its own Inbox it would process?
/sub
ReplyDeleteThat's also a good one: is there a way to subscribe to further comments to a toot on Mastodon, without actually leaving a reply yourself? Unless I overlooked that feature, any plans on adding support for that?
ReplyDeleteIt's something that has bugged me about GPlus from the start, and for which I've sent in several feedback reports in the past, when I was still hopeful that they were actually still listening to user feedback.