#Medium link; don't be surprised if it does weird things before showing you the article.
"Mastodon brought a protocol to a product fight"
> Yes, yes, the network is under immense strain as people flee the Elon strain infecting Twitter. But come on, there are folks who really believe this is going to replace, or even stand alongside Twitter, as a massively scaled social network? I call bullshit. While it’s impressive that millions of users have apparently given Mastodon a try, the product is far too slapdash and clunky to keep folks engaged. A lump of coal.
No, it isn't meant to be a #Twitter replacement. Keep your Twitter account until you no longer want it--or the company closes and the site shuts down--you can use Mastodon alongside Twitter.
And the #Fediverse networks are much more than just #Mastodon. Don't think you have experienced the network and all it has to offer if all you've done is briefly tried to use Mastodon, because you haven't experienced it.
> I’ve somehow avoided signing up for the service up until now. Largely because signing up was and is so comically obtuse — pick your server everyone, hope you choose wisely!
Have you not used e-mail? It works the same way. You pick a server, such as Gmail or Outlook dot com, and sign up. Please tell me you realize that the people you communicate with are not all on the same e-mail service that you use.
> But, but, it’s not a product, it’s a protocol. Yeah, that’s a nice thing to say. And to believe in. But I truly believe the ship has sadly sailed for such idealism in this space. Jack Dorsey can talk about how this should have been what Twitter was from the get go until he’s bluesky in the face. It’s just not going to happen. And he’s more to blame for that than most everyone else. As is he for the Elon element of this current equation. But that’s a different story.
Okay, so how about this story: Twitter has only been profitable two or three years of its entire history. Since it started, it has existed by burning through investors' funds. Eventually, with or without Elon Musk's ownership, that runs out. Without such funding, their corporate-centralized ( #corpocentric ) model cannot exist very long. And same for their centralized competitors, such as Post.news, Gab, Parler, and so on. What is left is either #federated or #peer-to-peer approaches, where no single entity is responsible for funding and managing the entire network. So whether it is the #Fediverse ( with #ActivityPub and #OStatus and their successors ) & the Federation ( with #Diaspora ) or #Bluesky, or #Twister, or #NOSTR, the eventual future of #socnets is #decentralized, if not entirely peer-to-peer unless a national government takes over Facebook and Twitter in order to provide effectively unlimited resources. It is the protocol that makes it possible for thousands or millions of instances to displace and replace one big centralized instance.
> We don't want "Twitter, but with my people in charge of the ban button", or even "Twitter, but with impartial benevolent people in charge of the ban button"
I think a lot of people want exactly that. But if they think about it, there are always some points where they disagree with most of "their people" and they'd rather have those decisions made differently.
It is a toss-up whether many people would be willing to leave an instance ... or self-host over this.
> we want a solution where no one and everyone has a ban button.
I think eventually, some #P2P elements (maybe like #Twister) will have to be added. Maybe servers / instances will turn into trusted relays for a P2P network. Or maybe P2P will be an add-on atop the existing federated networks.
No Sir! I can't send you my IP from here (my girlfriend's home). But I may send you my IP next Monday while watering flowers. Than you can force a connection to peer.
Latest about Twister blockchain:
Connections: 2 // not that much indeed... Known peers: 15253 Active DHT nodes: 5
Number of blocks in block chain: 400847 Time of the last block: Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 12:57:55 Mining difficulty: 0.0016226
Normally you can get up to 12 active DHT nodes and connections. All my news bots are running too.
Also: #Twister. “Twister”:{http://twister.net.co/} is a #P2P microblogging tool. Twister seemed a little complicated to get running, but once I did, it was cool.
Bitmessage seemed to be:
1. Mostly for person-to-person messages, but I don’t recall reading its security & privacy specifics.
2. A little tech-specific, as in not appealing to people who are not into the technology involved
3. Slow to develop ... I’m sure the note about using the updated patched version has been on the website for years.
Twister seemed to be:
1. Mostly for public microblog type posts.
2. I wasn’t really sure whether “following” did much.
3. At the time, it felt like things were actively moving, but I do remember a months-long thread about censorship resistance features that resulted in some contacts abandoning it.
@michel_slm I'm not aware of anything fundamental that would stop #Twister or #Scuttlebutt (random examples with roughly equivalent feature set) from continuing to work just fine if their user numbers matched Titter's. Are you? AFAIK the main thing that makes it hard to scale centralized systems is ... centralization. Whereas what makes it hard to grow user numbers on decentalized systems is user discovery, which centralizing does make easier.
@haydar Da gibt es noch zahlreiche Projekte, beispielsweise einen Musikdienst, der sich dezentral und quelloffen organisiert: https://funkwhale.audio/
Insgesamt sind da viele Projekte entstanden und die Fediverse-Auflistung müsste noch erweitert werden. #Twister fehlt insofern ja auch, wobei das ganz andere Wege geht: http://twister.net.co/
Na klasse: Ich möchte das nicht #Mastodon vorwerfen, aber manche Nutzer dort scheinen wirklich das Miteinander doch irgendwie falsch zu verstehen. Und genau da sind wir einmal wieder bei einem Kernpunkt: Die Sucht zur Selbstinszenierung. Keine Frage: Sich selbst in "Szene" setzen ist das Eine. Aber diskutieren und auch über sich selbst zu reflektieren das ganz Andere. Und wenn Jemand bereits mit "So denn will ich nun starten und mich hier profilieren!" beginnt wird es meines Erachtens nicht wirklich besser. Aber okay: Transportieren wir einfach mehr von #Twitter und Co. weiter hierher. Kann ja nicht schaden mehr "Mentalität" hier zu haben, oder doch? Faktisch kann es das und dann fehlen nur noch Werbemaßnahmen und das Chaos ist nahezu perfekt. Nun ja: #Pleroma und #Microblog werden dann zwar auch mit solch erhellenden Beiträgen versorgt, aber der Hintergrund ist ein Anderer. #GNU-social bleibt in jedem Fall für mich noch längerfristig und da wäre ja auch noch #Twister für Tests. ;)
@alanz@Antanicus@alcinnz I've been aware of #Twister for a while but haven't got around to testing it. Figuring out a way to bridge between that and the #ActivityPub#fediverse would be an intriguing experiment in testing out some of these concepts in practice :;)
Yeah, that's my feel too. ONe thing I kinda waited for is for Twister to create a library that I could then use in a stand-alone PyQT desktop app, which I feel would make more sense than asking users to run a daemon and connect on localhost.
@natejms The problem I've seen with social blockchains is that it doesn't really scale super well. #Twister is a blockchain clone of Twitter, and although the idea is neat, having to download the whole blockchain to participate is a huge bottleneck.
@1iceloops123@existentialbro@lnxw48a1 I somehow missed the post about #Twister in the thread and thought the "microblogging version of SteemIt" was about the original topic. Twister involves a blockchain but not cryptocurrency. They use Bitcoin's code just for claiming usernames and maybe for some post metadata. For content distribution they're using bittorrent. It seems similar to NightWeb if you ever saw that, except NightWeb was I2P based and you needed a url to find someone.
@existentialbro @1iceloops123 I've never heard of #Steemit before. #Twister has been around for a few years, though. When I used Twister, there was not any kind of otherwise-useless gamification token, which is what I see in the Wikipedia entry for Steemit.