This is a digression, but in reply to:

> Twitter's original win was that it was staggeringly simple, just asking new users to post about 'what they're doing right now' and offering simple controls to reply, repeat, or express approval

Twitter originally was even simpler than that! Replies were just new tweets prefixed with “@user” and retweets were just copies of the source tweet prefixed with “RT: “. As these conventions arose Twitter eventually turned them into first class features. Also it was originally named “Twttr”, though that didn’t last too long.

Edit: and you mainly searched on hash tags (#tags) since full-text search wasn't very far along. Amusingly their search index on hash tags worked a bit like hash tables! Though I assume that’s entirely a coincidence.

> (Twitter has 'tweets' but Mastodon has 'toots' because the logo is an elephant!)

It's a mastodon, not an elephant!!

Even worse when Mastodons are extinct creatures. Probably tells us about the platform itself being used by little to no one, other than just techies that won't admit that they still lurk on Twitter.

To add to that, toots sound like farts.

The different connotations for birds and mastodons suggest that the platforms will reach entirely different user groups. If Musk doesn't push video and other technologies then Twitter has already reached its full potential market share. This leaves many opportunities to Mastodon. If the social climate gets colder, mastodons are better equipped than most birds. In a world of gene technology, extinction is only temporary.

:-)

Ok but Mastodons were not arctic/northern animals like Mammoths. They were a temperate (& subtropical? i think) climate creature.

Apart from their bones another piece of evidence of their existence is the way many of the plants in the eastern Nort American forest adapted to have spikes/thorns that seem ineffective against deer & moose etc but would be deadly against browsing with a trunk. Black locust is like this.

I would have loved to have met one.

Now, for silly analogies, I dunno, it's likely that the ancestors of today's native Americans hunted them to extinction. (They were probably delicious). Can someone build an analogy from that? :-)

> When are Mastodon stans going to figure out that the reason people like Twitter is that it's (nominally) flat and you can interact with anyone unless they've blocked you for some reason

this is largely the same for the public instances. Mastodon/Pleroma/etc servers default to open/automatic federation when you install them. unless you're joining a community with a very specific theme -- say freespeechextremist -- you're likely to be able to @ >95% of other users who signed up to a public server. if you joined a public server that's been blacklisted by a significant portion of the network, you'll find out about that soon enough that ditching that instance and registering at a more "neutral" site isn't any cost. Poast is maybe the most edge-case to this, where a new user might be attracted to the internal meme-driven aspects, and not notice until a couple days of use the relatively smaller patterns of harassment which would lead other (large) instances to de-federate with them.

hmm, that's the example that made it click for me: my identity has little or nothing to do with my topic, in email, twitter, blogging - having an identity that's related to a themed server doesn't feel like the right layer at all.

I actively dislike the federation that Mastodon is using. If they would let me use somebody@gnail.com or somebody@hotmail.com, fine. Or somebody@mastodon.master-name-server. Instead, you have somebody@mastodon.technology.

Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.

It's really too bad that the idea of where you connect became conflated with what your name is.

PS: thanks to the person who was running mastodon.technology and found that it was too much to do with what else was going on in their life.

> Guess what? mastodon.technology is closing down. Any connections using that address are going to be lost.

If you want a globally unique identifier, pay for it. I hate to be "that guy" but nobody owes you DNS namespace. If you are caught on the unfortunate end of this, Mastodon explicitly offers account migration tools to mitigate the pain. That will redirect your old account to your new one, so at least confused users will be able to find you in the interim.

On the flip side, letting you use "somebody@gmail.com" as your ID just gives Google control over your identity, which I would consider a downgrade.

Free services was the best and worst thing to happen on the internet. Everyone is connected and information is free, but all information is free including yours and there’s no way to get people to make a change to something non free.

Is this not the same as email? If you ran your own you could use your own domain. If gmail ran an instance you could use @gmail.com . Otherwise you're at the whims of your host shutting down, like when google nearly pulled free google apps, or when microsoft used to reclaim accounts that didn't use the web UI often enough.

I guess what's needed here is an ecosystem of "point your DNS at us and use your own domain with your hosted service" ala fastmail and other providers for email.

I do run firstname@lastname.org I would love to be able to use that with Mastodon as my one and only identity, regardless of which server I happened to be logging into.

I like the idea of different servers as being Special Interest Groups. I use lists a lot on Twitter. But people who I put on a Mac list also talk about baseball, the war in Ukraine, etc. Google+ wanted to have each person separate out their posts by topic and that isn't the way most people seem to want to operate. For selling something, like Craigslist, OK, I'll put it in a specific category. But just things I want to write about? Unless there's a House of Dragons server, a Houston Astros server, a Rust server, etc. it's not going to happen.

I'm not sure if, by "the federation that Mastadon is using", you mean the concept of federation (in which case, I agree) or Mastadon's specific flavor of it; but, if you mean the latter, I want to say that's just a fundamental property of the concept of federated systems (as opposed to distributed ones): e-mail is also federated, and "where you connect" is the hostname on your e-mail server... if Gmail shuts down, so to will all of the connected links of people who decided to use Gmail as their host instead of running their own. I use saurik@saurik.com for my e-mail address, and (if I were to use Mastadon) would presumably also set up my own Mastadon setup, so I wouldn't be reliant on a large Mastadon host.

(Not said enough, though, is that DNS is itself federated: .com could one day decide to shut down, or simply take away saurik.com from me for whatever reason. Given the tradeoffs involved, I feel like that's the best place for me to stake my claim--particularly as custom TLDs didn't even exist back in the late 90s, but even now with them there are too many dangerous-seeming restrictions and the cost is too high that I'd still go with a .com--and yet it means that I'm not in some ways fundamentally different than the people who attach their identities to Google, even if I would claim Google isn't trustworthy, as that's just my opinion. I will say that gmail.com is also reliant on .com, and so there is an argument of my solution being strictly better, and yet I can make counter-arguments involving Google's political influence and the such.)

The issue, though--and maybe this is what you are focusing on?--is that, as far as I've ever been able to tell (just from perusing these random conversations: I do not myself use Mastadon currently), there seem to be features of Mastadon that simply work better if you are using a large shared host (which, to me, is kind of a fundamental design trajectory of federated systems: to obtain better discoverability, security, and ease-of-use, people slowly centralize onto a handful of larger players and over time the protocol becomes corrupted or limited by these large players who want to collude "for the good of the user" rather than remaining limited by the shared protocol).

There are both good sides and bad sides to that. In the same vein one could argue that the truly Verified identity should have their own domain. Why use Musks platform when they can have Bill@microsoft.com or Elon@tesla.com?

Is there a hosted Mastodon solution, where you can bring your own domain name and they do the rest, like how I can bring my domain name to any number of email providers?

You can definitely set up your own Mastodon server. I don't know how hard it is to get other servers to federate with you because I don't want to take on the overhead of running a server.

Discussions of running your own mail server make it sound like it's difficult because you have to get Microsoft and Google to accept your mail and they tend to let it go into the spam folder and not respond to you.

Will mastodon.social federate with HellsMaddy.social? Maybe. Can you use me@hellsmaddy.com? No.

stupid question but I guess having a central ID would go against the whole idea of Mastodon? I like the idea of "self hosted discord servers" but it seems weird to have a different identity for each "server" at that point. Is there any difference between Mastodon and forums at that point? Consistent UX?

Consistent UX I guess is part of it (tho not necessarily), but I think the bigger thing is that they're all federated by protocol, so activity from one is viewable by the others (assuming they're federated) it's a bit like FidoNet or even UUCP of old.

The advantage of federation is that it will allow Mastodon to outlive Twitter.