An instance is just a server running the Mastodon software. It doesn't really matter that much. You can sign up to almost any server and follow almost anyone on any other server. The nice part about Mastodon is that it doesn't have the adtech features of Twitter, so no ads (obviously) and no pressure to engage, usually negatively.

and it's open source, so any kind of momentum to open source software is just fantastic.

So on Twitter I am https://twitter.com/simongraysays, while on Mastodon I am https://indieweb.social/web/@simongray since the instance/server is part of the ID. In practice, while the local instance feed is fun if you're on a niche server, it doesn't matter much since you have access to the entire federation anyway.

I ended up on indieweb.social since I discovered https://indieweb.org/ a while back and it was the "official" community. Mastodon is built on several of the same W3C social network standards that the IndieWeb movement promotes.

This whole business feels like conj felt to me when I was starting out with Clojure. I was constantly worried about adding stuff at the front or in the back, but in practice it doesn’t matter much 🙂

Interesting analogy, @U04V5VAUN :thinking_face:

I’m still worrying about this server stuff on mastadon though.

What specifically?

That it has some unforseen implications that will come and bite me at some point in the future. I also feel like @borkdude tweeted about, if it doesn’t matter which server I join, then why should I have to care?

To paraphrase Simon a bit: 1. Different communities can host their own mastodon instances, and moderate them as they wish. This makes sure the the people who make mastodon can't remove your content. You choose to trust the people who run the instance you're on. 2. But you can follow people from any instance! So where your stuff is stored (instance) doesn't limit the content you can consume.

@U04V5VAUN @U3X7174KS I would add that the local feed of niche servers is a fun thing to have, e.g. my local feed is filled with people trying to resurrect the web of yesteryear with added social media powers, but I follow people from around the entire federation. The other thing to note is that the instances can also function as a means of verification, e.g. the EU officials reside on https://social.network.europa.eu/public so you can be sure anyone on there is an official EU account. In the same way. It's an alternative to Twitter verification based on data ownership.

This that it doesn't matter was super unclear when I created my Mastodon account. Which was some months ago. Hopefully they have improved the Ux. To me it felt like the Ux of any crypto thing.

The main issue is that following people is a copy-paste action and there is no way to get around that fact unless you install a browser extension.

Yup, it’s the UX thing that worries me. Making what seems to be important decisions up front when you don’t really understand/care about the consequences is bad UX.

Since web security is domain-based

I'm fine with copy/paste.

Can you move your account to different server?

yes

you can always move the account

Wow, then it matters even less.

and your followers come with you

So it’s some sort of implementation detail that’s leaking out?

To me it seems like an important feature.

kind of, but not really. It's like a BBS connected to a global Twitter-like community.

Though it totally stopped me from engaging.

Is my name reserved on all instances?

no

Interesting

So I can be pez@whereverpezisnot?

yes 😛

You can move your account but your posts don’t move with you, your followers do. Which strikes me as odd

I think you can have multiple accounts (on different servers) too which can verify each other by linking back

Not sure how this works in practice in the clients.

I'm @otfrom@functional.cafe thx to @U052TDWT7

I fail to find my current mastodon id...

@<mailto:[email protected]|[email protected]> because I just picked the most mainstream thing …

@borkdude, I haven't posted anything yet 😃

I kinda want @U3X7174KS@clojurians.something

I now moved my account and can be followed as @[email protected]

I'll eventually post something too. 😃 It really is a matter of bandwidth to me. Clojurians, Twitter and LinkedIn, is about what I can handle as a regular, then I occationally visit /r/clojure and ClojureVerse. Should really be looking at ClojureVerse more often. I always learn new things when visiting there.

Fight the FOMO! ❤️

I totally get that @U0ETXRFEW.

FYI https://fedifinder.glitch.me/

Thanks! Awesome service.

29 out of the the 963 accounts I follow seems to be on Mastodon.

But the Ux... On the web I can't figure out how to follow someone (where to paste) and on the phone I don't know how to get rid of the screen yelling at me to follow people. 😃

you paste into the search field

Thanks. Yeah, why would it be on the Followers & Following screen? 😃

😛

it really does need a big "add follower" button or some other way of easing that process. But once you get used to the copy-paste stuff it's ok.

It's OK. I like it, even. A note on the followers/following screen about that that is how you do it would have helped me a lot. A button in the side bar which would bring me to the search box with a tool tip, ”Paste user name here” would have helped too. 😃

I'm using it since quite a while but I'm not posting a lot of clojure relevant stuff (nor do I do a lot of Clojure outside of lurking here). We tried to re-create the clojure guppe (a "group" which is a bot which will boost any toot that includes it), but I'm currently not clear whether this actually works -- I think the http://a.gup.pe server is currently overloaded.

@U0ETXRFEW I'm [email protected]

I’m on it (https://mastodon.social/@vijaykiran) - but I don’t post much. Pretty much like Twitter. @clojurians.social instance sounds interesting to setup - not sure if it’s appropriate for me when I only post dog photos.

the clojure.cloud domain is available...

Not sure if core team would be happy if we grab that 😛

I suggested that Mastodon makes it easier to discover the copy/paste method of following people. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/19976 I might check how easy it is to hack on this thing too, we'll see. 😃

> the clojure.cloud domain is available... i kind of like the separation between clojurians (community) and clojure (official). > @clojurians.social instance sounds interesting to setup - not sure if it’s appropriate for me when I only post dog photos. @clojurians.social sounds like a great handle "surname" to me.

if there’s enough interest, I’ll bite the bullet and setup an instance 😅

I believe I am as of now the owner of clojure.cloud

If someone wants to set up a mastodon server under that domain, I’d be happy to transfer or point or whatever.

Would this be exclusive invite-only for clojurians?

@U04V5VAUN what about @borkdude@clj-commons.org ;)

🙂

You can be both as long as someone sets up @borkdude@clojure.cloud

Somethng like this could be feasible: https://marketplace.digitalocean.com/apps/mastodon

Anyways, lunch time.

I guess that’s the difference between having a proper job

Setting up and maintaining is a non-trivial amount of work, needs some SMTP and block storage, backup etc. (if it needs to be made available for public) - maybe using one of hosted mastodon services is easier

for my own usage, I’d still wan to run on my own server, but for community server needs more guarantees 😛

There is also a one-click Digital Ocean thing?

Needs SMTP server/service

Although the files can be saved to disk (optionally s3/minio)

yeah, like, join my privately ran e-mail server, it's fun! until it's not and then you can't log into your important things anymore :)

digital ocean is just automating the installation - afaics

i was looking at https://masto.host/pricing/ - everything is temporarily unavailable 💀

> Would this be exclusive invite-only for clojurians? I think it should be something open to everyone. But it might invite a moderation hell?

This is kind of why I joined mastodon.social - I would expect such a huge server to be too big too fail. But this might be contrary to what federation is for ;)

The setup of functional.cafe is: • Small Hetzner VPS + a StorageBox (100GB) • Daily machine snapshots by Hetzner + postgresql backups • Mailgun free tier for emails I'm running it from 2017 with not a lot of issues, but it's quite small (around 400 users at the moment).

I got some hetzner capacity lying around - but I’ve to be very careful in offering to admin a server 😛 especially opening it up for 20k folks

@U052TDWT7 uploads are stored to disk (storagebox?)

Yep

Here's a PR on Mastodon to make it easier to discover ser search. Please throw some thumbs up on it, if you agree! https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/20010

just got myself: @U0524B4UW@functional.cafe , so i can lurk in the fediverse, just like twitter

Think of "instance" as "community". I originally joined mastodon.social because I "didn't know better" and then moved to a more suitable instance for me. When I was on Twitter, what I mostly wanted was some tech stuff related to Clojure (and maybe some other stuff) and LGBTQIA stuff. So I joined https://tech.lgbt and the local timeline is great -- for my interests -- and the community is well-moderated, which I like. I'm @[email protected] or you can browse to https://tech.lgbt/@seancorfield One thing to be aware of is that some of the well-moderated communities have agreed to suspend/unfederate some other instances that tend to draw people who are not friendly to that community. So far, I know of two Clojurians who have joined instances that are suspended from federation as far as my community is concerned (there are a lot of suspended instances!). http://liberdon.com and http://qoto.org are on the suspended list for my instance.

Yes, it seems I can't follow (or even find) you, @U04V70XH6. Good thing you are on this Slack and on Twitter. 😃

Yeah, I wasn't sure if the suspension meant your instance couldn't even see my instance (but I figured that was probably the case) -- I knew it was true the other way around. I'm pretty much not on Twitter any more. I have a cross-poster configured so that specific posts I make to Mastodon can appear on Twitter (if I remember to tag them correctly), but I've deleted Twitter from my phone and I've deauth'd the few apps I still had connected (except the cross-poster).

Would be good to know the defederation list if possible. I wouldn't want to be on a server yours wouldn't federate with @U04V70XH6

@otfrom Some instances post that list on their /about/more page I think, but I suspect you need to be logged into that server in at least some cases (whilst admins share defederation lists with each other, they seem to be reticent about posting the lists publicly -- presumably because bad actors could see their domain is blocked and just set up a new domain and harass people from there: I see several similar domains in the long list on tech.lgbt which look like they might have originated from the same group of people).

I discovered from some threads that there are several instances run by small, tight-knit groups of marginalized folks who won't federate mastodon.social since it's sort of the 800 lb gorilla in terms of "communities"... and I can understand that since it isn't moderated (in any real way) and it has 152K active users right now.

Eugen "Gargron" posted that the network has over 1M active users now (I think there are 6M+ accounts on the network?) and overall nearly half a million new users since October 27th and more than 1,000 new servers have joined the federation since then...

Europe in particular seems to love Mastodon: https://indieweb.social/web/@[email protected]/109307128673998522

The focus on privacy, compared to the US, I suspect. (`http://bitcoinhackers.org` is not federated from my instance but I can set that post on the web)

I suppose it depends on what you value. I value a slower rolling conversation with a wide variety of people in multiple locations where consent and kindness is paramount and commercial concerns beyond keeping the lights on aren't given primacy.

I’d also add - if you value distribution/decentralisation/peer-to-peer, but find the current incarnation via web3/blockchain off-putting (e.g. for cultural reason), then give it a chance

(makes me think of all those “out of vogue” online game that’s created one or two decades ago… and the server is still running, somewhere, today:scream_cat:)

The Fediverse is far from kind, or peer to peer

@UK0810AQ2 that’s sad. :melting_face: you have a story?

something like this: https://rosenzweig.io/blog/the-federation-fallacy.html

No, just technical and social criticisms

Each instance is monocular to the extreme and infractions are often punished personally because you're and the whims of admins. We'll see more of it as the high runs out. While the inner dynamics are like a creepy house full of people abusing their power over vulnerable individuals, the federated dynamics are exceptionally hostile, where different instances are effectively at a state of war and not communicating, like a bunch of passive aggressive house mates. Technically, it's not peer to peer, you're still a client, and at the mercy of people you can't trust not to abuse their power. They make technical decisions on your behalf (who you can talk to based on federation. Imagine you couldn't call anyone at Spain), your data is at their mercy, both personally and with regards to technical competence And that's just off the top of my head

@UK0810AQ2 What you see as downsides, I see as upsides because I like well-moderated, focused spaces. It really does depend on what you want from an online community. For me, Mastodon is everything I like about Twitter but without the things I dislike about Twitter, at least as far as the instance I've decided to live on is concerned.

Well moderated, except for trolls and other instances you don't control and haven't defederated from yet. The granularity of control I want is 1, which is what you get in peer to peer networks. You decide who you talk to. You make policy. You can run all spaces you want however you want. You're not accountable to anyone else and all you have going for you is your reputation. I don't want anything from an online community, because I see the very notion as a contradiction in terms. At most it can be like a social club, but that requires knowing everyone in a first name basis. Identity management is a flawed notion 🙂

The only reason I'm in twatter is Clojure people. Want nothing to do with social media

And that's a fair position to hold. I know several people who just detest "social media" as a whole. I use Signal to communicate directly with a number of friends (even tho' I also have most of them on "social media" as well).

I have a bridge setup from Mastodon to cross-post specific things to Twitter at this point so I can make sure my #C03S1KBA2 posts still appear on Twitter for folks who don't want to be "social" on Mastodon.

What bridge setup are you using, @U04V70XH6?

You might be interested in https://genart.social/about @U0AQ3HP9U. Currently invite-only, though.

Thanks all 🙂 For your very varied pointers!

@simongray https://moa.party so you can do conditional cross-posting in either/both directions.

At first, I intended to continue posting (only) #clojure stuff on Twitter and wanted it reflected back into fedi -- and set up unconditional Twitter -> Mastodon cross-posting. But then I started to see more Clojurians on Mastodon and decided to change it to conditionally post from Mastodon -> Twitter (if I tag with #moa) so now I can post freely on fedi and just tag my Clojure stuff with #clojure #moa and it appears on Twitter for folks who still follow me there -- and I don't have to even look at Twitter now.