Yesterday Gargron helped me get his take on the project, so that I can write a mission statement. But, I would also love to hear your take, so I can combine the two into our collective statement.
This is me trying to be more transparent with the process.
Feel free to help me answer these questions:
1. What does Mastodon mean to you?
2. Where do you want to see the project go?
3. How do you talk about Mastodon with your friends?
@louisfram @maloki Given the lack of Twitter's cooperation on this, I think this would really be a separate "product". One might operate a bridge server that would take your Twitter credentials to mirror your responses, and pull data from Twitter to mirror tweets of people you followed.
@maloki
1. It has the GOOD elements of Twitter and Facebook and then some...(love the federation)...
2. For now its pretty good how it is...
3. I've talked to some, but I don't think people understand the good part without having tried it...
How can we explain the good parts of Mastodon so they understand to users who haven't tried it?
@maloki
It's really like car sales, once you get the potential for a test drive, they WILL buy the car.
@maloki
Oh, there is a small obstacle I see, its the existance of so MANY instances: people ask themselves where they should sign in? Maybe the answer is to have a centralized entry point for otherwise decentralized project, some central point where you can look up for the right place for you based on location/personal taste AND to stress out the basic irrelevance (in most cases) of such choice...
@bumbar We are building a landing page, it's just going very slow. :D
@maloki
Just make a nice sounding url people will associate with Mastodon, other parts will come into place...
@maloki There might be different angles to cover depending on audience and context, so pinpointing audience and context would be useful first.
But, both serious and fun messages would be good, not delivered together, exactly. E.g. the strongest serious thread to keep hitting home regardless of audience is the increased protection, support, and choice.
Fun... I like thinking of the fediverse as some massive Burning Man festival in space, and I'm Dr. Horton Heirsahoo with a time machine.
1. To me Mastodon means revival of decentralized open-source social media. And chronological timelines aceDA.
2. I want to see the project take cold from websites with communities, to start integrating with a bigger social web. (Say Twitch, deviant art etc).
3. It's like Twitter, but like Email, but like... It's good okay! Just come, hang out, it's got New Car Smell!
@maloki 1. It's our shot at breaking our social circles free from proprietary lock-in. I live away from most of my friends and nowadays I can only interact with them via FB. :( We need to reclaim our friendships from corporate control.
2. I want to see it continue to reach non-techie audiences. I think this is the first decentralized initiative that "gets it". The Argentine surge makes me hopeful.
3. "It's open, doesn't belong to a company, it has web/Android/iOS UIs, it's growing fast!"
Also, thank you to @Rushyo who pushed my thoughts into action, of asking ya'll what you thought in the matter.
This was clearly the right decision. You should really follow them, because they like poking holes on thought patterns!
@maloki fwiw I just want to put in a small word here that I ... don't actually care about chronological timelines? As a user, I like seeing things I'm interested in, and stuff like "since you've been gone" and "you might enjoy" on twitter have actually really improved my experience.
anyway I get that that was just jokes but I wanted to share anyways :D
Decentralized Social Media Revival is the reason I'm here. Everything else flows from that.
@nightpool Personally I am literally here for the chronological timelines, because without it as default, it has made Facebook and G+ unusable for me. On Twitter I can still turn it off, which is good. :)
But I come from an IRC background, so maybe it has to do with that?
@maloki Maybe? I mean, don't get me wrong, I want to see *everything*. Something that hides content from me, like Facebook, is an automatic no for me. I will refuse to use it.
But I also like discoverability, and twitter's "show me a clearly delineated block of 'just the highlights' but along with, not in place of, my feed" really hits both spots for me.
@nightpool yeah I can appreciate that as a nice feature. :)
@maloki 1. It means ostatus is now, after a very long hiatus, a grown-up protocol, with two interoperable implementations, more or less.
1) Mastodon means no company owns this type of communication.
2) I want to see more implementations, more front- and back-ends, more instances. I want people to easily run their own and solve the discovery problem somehow. I want easy of customization.
3) "Comrades, I bring tidings of a better future!"
mastodon related Show more
mastodon related (cont.) Show more
@maloki 2. I want to see very smart people working together, somehow, to keep thing thing from going off the rails. That's very, very hard with decentralization. Maybe @Gargron can manage it as Mastodon BDFL, but as we get forks and other threats, it's going to be hard. Not sure how to help (using my W3C resources, such as they are).
@maloki 1. To me, Mastodon is the decentralized, resilient (against both technical failures and Nazis) social network the world deserves.
2. I want to see Mastodon focus on accessibility and usability, along with providing tools for preventing harassment.
3. I tell my friends "It's like twitter but if you don't like the moderators you can go somewhere you do like them, and still talk to everyone else."
@maloki 1. A cozy social media place that seems to have evaded the common social media pitfalls that exist elsewhere.
2. On the technical side: a way for me to schedule toots and integrate accounts for different instances would be nice. On the community side: hmmm. Maybe some community events? People making mastodon instances with some specific purpose (RP, for example). Things similar to caturday, but perhaps more tuned to each instance's interests?
3rd one incoming.
@maloki 3. I'll admit I haven't spoken much about it yet. Some people demonstrated some interest. Most didn't though. I feel like I didn't do a good enough job of explaining that mastodon is not Yet Another Social Media Platform They Need To Be On, I think
1. It means a new tool to communicate and share ideas with people around the world;
2. I think Mastodon should be a contrasting social network, avoiding fan clubs(the reason I believe TW is down now) dedicated principally to share ideas;
3. I never spoke about it yet, just want to see how far I go without it. I only know one person from other social networkings here.
@maloki
1 and 3. Mastodon is a twitter alternative that is more prone to interesting conversations because of the higher character limit; it is Free Software and can be self-hosted; it is federated and can be community-managed at a very low level. The data is not monetised, the privacy controls are spot on, and there are no ads.
2. I want to see privacy, a healthy and welcoming community, the capacity to migrate and delete an account, and a very easy instance setup.
@maloki
1) No algorithms/social engineering by companies. I've worked in social media for 10 years and have seen what algorithms do. Algorithms are the real censorship.
2) Having actual communities that were maybe possible on other sites years ago but have since been gutted by the need for ad clicks.
3) Where do y'all find these "friends"? That's kinda why I'm on Masto. 😜
@maloki my 2c
1. A worthy and appealing vehicle for displacing proprietary monolithic networks designed for vendor/advertiser control, with something that gives power to the user community to define their own environments.
2. Grow the network while maintaining protocol interoperability and maintaining the freedom of the software.
3. Either "here is a new alternative to Twitter which fixes some of the problems" or "Look at how this is growing, think about what this will enable"
@maloki 1. A place where I can meet and talk to people I don't have contact with physically. People with different experiences and perspectives. Without having upsetting current events constantly in my face, letting me choose when and how to engage with that stuff.
2. Making sure to take care of people who are the target of harassment or systemic oppression. Especially people of color, who I think have been underserved to date. Some kind of account migration thing.
@maloki Or at least some kind of official way to notify followers that/when you switch primaries.
3. Most of my friends, even ones who use birdsite heavily, but are sort of bleh on it, seem super skeptical of Mastodon. I reference it, but try to not get pushy. I think a major factor is skepticism that there are forces other than just it's newness that prevent Mastodon from just becoming birdsite in the long run. Expressing (and building) that insurance would help talk about Mastodon, IMO.
@maloki Hi, thank you for asking!
1. It social media done the way the Internet was always meant to be: decentralized, local and global, made by people with their own quirks and values.
2. I hope it will be easy for everyone to customize, add new layers of functionality, make specialized sharing applications...
3. It's easy and fun like Twitter and Facebook, but not owned and controlled and monetized by one giant corporation.
@maloki Here's my cent :
1. Twitter alternative that respects my privacy (since I host it by myself on my computer)
2. I have no clue. I like mastodon the way it is right now.
3. Since I don't talk about mastodon's alternatives to my friends (and they don't get the privacy problems), I don't talk about mastodon either
Cheers !
@maloki 1. A social medium where my data isn't owned by a company who'll try to use it or me for profit. Instance-specific, an admin who makes sure no nasty people disturb our peace and fun.
2. I'd like to see Mastodon succeed in drawing new users (not just accounts) and keeping them. Biggest obstacles I think are discoverability (how do I find people with similar interests through just Mastodon), and a lack of multi-column grouping a la Tweetdeck. The emphasis on public TLs isn't worth it I think. They're already becoming unusable with the current user numbers.
(cont.)
@maloki (cont.)
3. Not much really. I've mentioned it a few times, but the ones (most of them) who don't already use Mastodon follow lots of people on Twitter, so it's a chicken&egg problem. The huge influx of Japanese users might help for friends who follow mostly artists or anime creators.
@maloki 2. make a RFC for toots suggesting small edits (think edits*, -edit, like on IRC); let readers choose if they want to hide, to apply or to show these toots, with special cases for self-edits.
@xdej There's EDIT on IRC now?! ... Wait, that makes sense, becaue Discord is layred ontop of IRC. That never occurred to me :o
I feel so old. :>
@maloki informal edits makes more than 10% of posts on IRC. Don't know any IRC client which would apply them instead of just showing them.
@xdej it's been a while since I used irc directly, so to speak.
But other than that I was on there from age of 12-26
@maloki 3/ I tell friends mastadon is like Twitter, but for anime.
1) Ending the GAFA reign. Taking the power back.
2) From Mastodon, implementing new distributed social applications
3) I told them I was on Mastodon before them ;-)
@perseus A lot of servers run on AWS thought. :D
@maloki Ouch. One step at a time.
@maloki It means a twitter/microblogging which is not under the control of a US corportation. It's a step towards the original, decentralized, internet.
@maloki Also I like the sillyness and the fun ness. "Toot" and fart jokes. And witches.town is only open for ½ hr. This isn't some sanitized, corporate thing afraid of appearing slick. It's just a bunch of people gigglin.
1. The chance to build something for real communities and honest interaction in a way that respects people.
2. Many things will just evolve. Structurally we need focus and decentralization at a smaller scale, because I’ve seen to many FOSS project losing focus and right now a Gmail of Mastodon could still destroy the main idea of the project.
3. If you have time just try it and try to find out what it could be for you. You’ve nothing to lose.
@maloki Mastodon means pretty much kirakiratter.com to me at this point. I want to see it evolve because I want to see Kirakiratter become better, as the community there is just lovely. As such, when introducing it to my friends, I just introduce them to the lovely community at Kirakiratter
@maloki
I.M.O:
1. Decentralization- a perfect example of the decentralized web. A fresh slate! A good community- small, respectful enough to be nice with a good dose of internet
2. To focus in on what matters rather than what other platforms have.
3. "Have you heard of Mastodon?"
"No, what is it?"
"Well, it's like decentralized twitter. People are respectful and you can talk about whatever you'd like."
"Uh, okay."
Then they walk away. :-P
@maloki
1. The opportunity to experiment and understand the difference between proprietary centralized platforms, and decentralized open source ecosystems. Many important decisions about my digital life are emerging from the experience.
2. Ideally, it should keep a core of openness and transparent debate on critical decisions. And let it flow.
3. Hey, remember BBSs and IRC in the 90s, the blogosphere in the early 00s, or the Brazilian Orkut in 2005? Come and check for yourself!
All your answers are overwhelming! I don't have words for this...
Thank you 💞
2. I want it to be used not only by tech nerds, but nerds in general. Normies too, eventually. 3. Great question. I say it's like twitter, only better. And then I explain what twitter is. And I say why mastodon is better: federation, better culture. And then I respond that I love the name as well. Follow up questions that people have are exactly 1., and the answer is: my one-stop for exchanging any ideas, both long- and short-term. Thank you
@maloki (3) Instead of selling it as "a federated social network" (too vague & complex for most people), I would like to call #Mastodon as "the social network that doesn't go away by a company's whim" or "the social network as resilient as a real human language" or "the network that is governed by its users". You know, *benefits* of federation instead of the name "federated" itself.
@masoud Speaking about resiliance, it'd be great if your account could also be distributed on several trusted instances.
@maloki 2/ we'd like Mastodon to integrate Twitter as a particular instance, and to allow interactions with Twitter users (following, quoting, RTint, navigating tweets)