Mastodon - "Decentralized" Twitter Knockoff & Rat King Breeding Ground

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Old Wizard said:
Thank God. A social media site with only "No Nazis!" as the promoted motivation for joining won't ever be able to compete with larger social media sites. Most normal human beings who aren't batshit far-lefties realise if they see a white supremacist on twitter/tumblr/whatever they can just block them and move on.
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I'd be rich if I got a dollar every time some far lefty says they're leaving Twitter for Mastodon only to come back (since it's not like they're being banned or anything). The only people who end up using these types of sites are the people who get banned off Twitter, which leaves the hentai/lolicon artists, the far right, and the craziest of the far left.

I know a personal lolcow who is the epitome of generic far lefty (paranoid, RTing anything to "own the "nazis", transtrender, etc.), and he said he was leaving Twitter for Mastodon. He still logs into Twitter from time to time, because he has 14 times as many followers on Twitter.
 
Isn't witches.town a giant rat king all its own? Every account I've seen from there is, without fail, some obnoxious genderspecial.
 
Have any of these alt services worked? Not just Mastodon, but Gab, voat, or any others? Most of them seem to die off because they become purely political and that is it. I highly doubt anyone goes on gab or mastodon to talk with people about cooking tips or hobby stuff. This on top of the fact that none of these sites do anything that much different from their base counter parts, explains why they just stagnate. Its all just a new coat of paint on Not Twitter/Reddit/Facebook.

If you want one of these alt things to do well and be relevant you have to do something different and new that makes you worth going to en masse instead of hyper specific political blocs. Best example I can think of this currently might be discord.
 
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X68000 said:
Isn't witches.town a giant rat king all its own? Every account I've seen from there is, without fail, some obnoxious genderspecial.
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A lot of mastodon instances are. For example, cybre.space, a instance for all the genderspecials who larp as Cyberpunks. I spent a few minutes clicking random profiles, and they all had pronouns, with constant abuse of that shitty "glitch" aesthetic.

Pop-Tart said:
Have any of these alt services worked? Not just Mastodon, but Gab, voat, or any others? Most of them seem to die off because they become purely political and that is it. I highly doubt anyone goes on gab or mastodon to talk with people about cooking tips or hobby stuff. This on top of the fact that none of these sites do anything that much different from their base counter parts, explains why they just stagnate. Its all just a new coat of paint on Not Twitter/Reddit/Facebook.

If you want one of these alt things to do well and be relevant you have to do something different and new that makes you worth going to en masse instead of hyper specific political blocs. Best example I can think of this currently might be discord.
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Maybe in the past some did but that's when the internet climate was different, when lots of people would go to message boards like this one for a specific topic instead of some subreddit and when there was room to compete against a lot of sites. Most of the time "alt" services that succeed tend to target the mainstream crowd and have enough funding, while being combined with a major service stagnating. That's how MySpace died and how Skype lost market share to Discord heavily among internet dwellers. Nowadays most traffic is clustered into a select few websites.
150304_consumer-internet1.jpg

The main reason so many of these sites die though comes down to two main things: Lack of content and money. Nobody ever uses these sites outside of fringe minorities, and even before that was a major problem money was.

Probably the most notable example of this before politics were an issue was Zippcast. During one of the many million YouTube changes ago YouTube changed the layout again and kids were threatening to boycott it. The solution? Zippcast, a YouTube knockoff made with MediaShare Suite, a YouTube clone script. It was always down when people were hyping it up, losing videos, had no fucking content worth watching, etc, and I think this video summed up why it died best:

Outside of specific lolcows who refused to use YouTube whatsoever after new changes such as MylarBalloonFan or the Pooh's Adventures crowd (who got kicked off Zippcast), nobody used it. Eventually in 2016 (4 years later) it folded, with the owner saying he blew $60,000 of his own money on it.

Mastodon won't suffer the money problem since anyone can host an instance and the software is completely FOSS, but it still suffers from the lack of content, along with unique issues such as instance blocking. You already have instances that advertise free speech (and existed before Gab was a thing) being blocked by a lot of mastodon instances, which can lead to someone being unable to follow someone else because their instance blocked yours.
 
I was introduced to mastodon through a "all inclusive fictionkin/otherkin/furry/trans/lgbtqiawtfbbq" discord chat (was eventually banned for questioning people) and the admin for the discord chat touted it as an extreme left leaning "safe space" alternative for twitter.

while I was on it last year, 99% of it was newsbots who would just spam articles from various websites like CNN, and clickbait. It was hard to find *any* user generated content, as most of it was just spambots.
 
CIA Nigger said:
A lot of mastodon instances are. For example, cybre.space, a instance for all the genderspecials who larp as most notable example of this before politics were an issue was Zippcast. During one of the many million YouTube changes ago YouTube changed the layout again and kids were threatening to boycott it. The solution? Zippcast, a YouTube knockoff made with MediaShare Suite, a YouTube clone script. It was always down when people were hyping it up, losing videos, had no fucking content worth watching, etc, and I think this video summed up why it died best:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=yMWV7hYGapU
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Good post, but man that video is almost as autistic as zippcast itself. Trying to do the whole angry ranting thing 3 years after it stopped being fashionable without actually telling me all that much about zippcast.
 
X68000 said:
Good post, but man that video is almost as autistic as zippcast itself. Trying to do the whole angry ranting thing 3 years after it stopped being fashionable without actually telling me all that much about zippcast.
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That's because everything that touched Zippcast was autistic. Hell even the ED page on it is a fucking joke.
 
Mastodon will at least simmer for 5~10 years instead of being stillborn. Pawoo's an enormous instance and the protocol itself is pretty interesting. I haven't seen anything more than low-key cringe out of the tangleshit of big English instances though.
 
X68000 said:
Isn't witches.town a giant rat king all its own? Every account I've seen from there is, without fail, some obnoxious genderspecial.
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It is! In fact, someone banning Laurelai based on evidence of prior bad behavior was considered a transphobic act and got the whole instance shut down in April. Nothing of value was lost, people migrated to any of the other umpteen million rat king instances, and Wesley went right back to shitting up starrevolution.org.

I posted this in the Laurelai Bailey thread when the drama was ongoing:
Don't Call Anybody said:
Drama surrounding Laurelai is causing the death of a Mastodon instance.


The Fediverse is currently blowing up with news that witches.town is closing on 30 April because of drama with other people moderating the instance. The owner of the instance disbanded the entire sysop team because one of them "suspend[ed] the account of a trans woman based on an old smear campaign pushed by 4 chan." Laurelai supported the owner's decision.


And oh, hey, look who has a dead witches.town account.


Source (archive)
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I'd like to interject for a moment to give a fragmented and incomplete biased history of the fediverse.

Mastodon is just the name of a software that allows users to connect to a larger network commonly known as the fediverse. There are several other software that do the same thing Mastodon does.

The history of the fediverse is very convoluted and much of it is lost because of it's decentralized nature and lack of people interested in documentation. The first prominent software was Friendi.ca and GNUsocial in 2010. While Friendica tried to emulate facebook, GNUsocial attempted to emulate twitter.

The original state of the fediverse up until 2015 was mostly FOSS nerds, Spanish speakers and anarchists. The largest instances were run by the maintainer of GNUsocial, a leftist swede named Hannes. These were the Quitter instances.

Sometime in late 2015, several new instances using the GNUsocial software popped up, populated by gamergate people banned from twitter, 8channers, shitposters and other weirdos. These instances came to be known informally as the GNUsocial Axis. There was a shitstorm on the Quitter side of the fediverse when they realized for the first time that in a decentralized system, they had no way of banning people they disagreed with. Eventually, the drama dissipated because the newcomers weren't anywhere near as bad as what quitter users feared and the political climate back then was more easygoing in general.

By October 2016, relations had cooled off between Quitter users and the Axis. Eugen Rochko AKA Gargron, another swede created Mastodon that month. Mastodon was created because development on GNUsocial was almost nonexistent. Improvements in site usability made the fediverse a viable alternative to twitter for normies for the first time, and the Mastodon project attracted a lot of media attention from sites like tech sites like Ars Technica. Many users signed up on Eugen's flagship instance mastodon.social under the misconception that "Mastodon is Twitter without nazis". The new wave of SJWs began complaining about the content they saw and demanded more moderation without understanding the implications of blocking instances on the fediverse.

Early 2017, mastodon.social started using blocklists to prevent Axis instances from federating, meaning that no posts from a nazi instance were displayed to mastodon.social users. Eugen expressing contempt for GNUsocial users didn't help relations much. Many Mastodon admins used blocklists like their own personal block, even though it applied to everyone who used the instance. Instead of just blocking particular users, entire instances were labelled evil because of a single post. Here is one of the silliest blocklists.

In April of 2017, pawoo.net was created by Pixiv, the deviantart of Japan. One of the main reasons it was created was because Japanese artists were constantly being shadowbanned or restricted for posting things like lolicon. It became the largest instance on the fediverse within a week and several other large Japanese companies hosted mastodon instances. The sudden wave of japanese posts, lolicon and lewd anime girls enraged the users of mastodon.social much to the delight of the GNUsocial axis. Eugen blanket banned the largest instance on the fediverse from his instances to protect his hugbox.

In early 2018, a user from the GNUsocial Axis began work on a new software to replace the dying one written by anarchist swedes called Pleroma. Pleroma was much faster and lightweight than both GNUsocial and Mastodon, and was adopted by some Axis instances. Because it wasn't bloated like Mastodon, it could run on any computer including a raspberry pi, making the ideal of decentralization actually possible by lowering the requirements for self-hosting (AKA hosting your own instance). Predictably, social justice instances on the Mastodon side immediately labelled the developers and users of the software as evil nazis. Several Mastodon users and admins advocated a complete defederation from any site using the Pleroma software.

It is worth noting that not all Mastodon instances are hugboxes. niu.moe has rules for it's own users, but does not prevent it's users from seeing Axis posts. Because of their neutrality, they've been blocked by some social justice instances. noagendasocial.com is another mastodon instance that does not censor what it's users see.

As of now, Pleroma is catching up with Mastodon for feature parity much to Eugen's frustration. If you want a laugh, read this blocklist, which also by pure coincidence happens to be an excellent directory of instances to sign up for if you value being able to speak without being censored.

http://telegra.ph/Instances-to-silencesuspend-on-Mastodon-06-23

My point is that there is more than just social justice Mastodon instances on the fediverse. It is a very diverse ecosystem of anarchists, furries, unix neckbeards, shitposters, anime girl RP, SJWs, free software fundamentalists, Japanese artists and lolcows.

If you're talking about the network as a whole, the proper nomenclature is the fediverse. Mastodon is just a software.
 
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Whenever you see someone from South America (Svetlana claims to be from Brazil) being exceptional like this, always remember that they tend to be a part of an overclass of spoiled kids raised entirely online. They pretend to be American radical cybernerds all day while being gigantic parasites on not only their own societies but whatever political movements they claim to be a part of.
 
Pop-Tart said:
Have any of these alt services worked? Not just Mastodon, but Gab, voat, or any others? Most of them seem to die off because they become purely political and that is it. I highly doubt anyone goes on gab or mastodon to talk with people about cooking tips or hobby stuff. This on top of the fact that none of these sites do anything that much different from their base counter parts, explains why they just stagnate. Its all just a new coat of paint on Not Twitter/Reddit/Facebook.

If you want one of these alt things to do well and be relevant you have to do something different and new that makes you worth going to en masse instead of hyper specific political blocs. Best example I can think of this currently might be discord.
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No Twitter/Facefuck/whatever social media clone website will ever be popular because most of the value of a social media site is based on the number of users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
Thus first mover advantage is massive, if your site doesn't have some kind of special feature that hugely distinguishes itself from other social media, no one will want to use it.
 
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