I just hope we walk before we try to run. It feels like Mastodon has been given a colossal opportunity and it feels like it’s being completely squandered.
I trust that Space Jerk will give Mastodon a very long opportunity window but the sooner the better.
Maybe revolution is a good idea and I’m completely wrong. But I still find Mastodon so frustrating and unreliable that I am just not on social media at all now.
Apparently as a baby I learned to run before walking so I want to defend doing it that way.
Running is a bit easier than walking, walking is a process of carefully balancing at each step. Running is just falling, but you catch yourself before you hit the ground. As long as you aren’t too concerned with steering, you can easily at least run until you find an obstacle. And then you’ve learned about a new type of obstacle!
Even the fastest baby should have trouble getting into trouble as long as the parents are attentive — they are tiny and parents have long arms to catch them.
Babies barely have the capability to generate enough kinetic energy to harm themselves I’m pretty sure.
Or I dunno, at least I survived. Apply this to your analogy as you’d like.
Haha, fair enough. Hopefully the slightly tongue in cheek nature of my post came through.
I’ve always understood this to be what the expression was about, though. Skipping the first step to jump recklessly and possibly incorrectly to the second.
Yeah I’m not sure I feel strongly about my own opinion. I think I’m just worried that a bunch of engineers, in absence of designers and product, are going to do what engineers do best: find fun technical problems to solve.
I feel like it was squandered as well, but I don't blame anyone on that, Mastodon core team employed their second person last month full-time.
When the next wave comes I hope if Mastodon can't get its act together there are commercial offerings that can take the wave, and I'm all for it. Cloudflare is building its own Mastodon API-compatible server, and Medium put its own instance.
This is what I’m super pumped about. Because of the fundamentals of the technology, big actors with resources to do it properly can make Mastodon awesome, without completely capturing the social network.
Just curious, what is unreliable for you? My setup is as reliable as Twitter ever was for me (I run my own server). Some things are annoying of course, but I’m a little surprised techy people would find those rough edges so bad they wouldn’t use it.
I’m not on the same server as all my Twitter friends and I cannot get my timeline to reliably update with everyone’s Toots and Goots.
It works if I catch up the next morning. But there is no reliable ability for real-time Toot Blooting.
In all fairness I took two weeks off. Maybe it’s better. Or maybe I need to try another server (three tries so far.)
Figuring out what server to pick was ridiculous. I eventually decided “just find a really popular one.” But they were all just crashing out when making an account or were closed to new accounts.
I misunderstood what “federated” meant because I also learned that it really matters what server you’re on. It’s not like email. The length of your Toot is different, rules of what you Toot is different. The stuff on your server is a bit more first class than what’s on other servers. And my Toot Boots didn’t Doot Doot or Bloot Flute.
It sounds like you joined the really big servers when they were buckling under the load. I’ve not had any of these problems at normal times, or with servers that weren’t being hammered. I will say that with the caveat that I haven’t paid that much attention to real-time posting.
There's actually a lot of software projects, Mastodon is just by far the most popular one.
From top of my head, there are more extensive lists out there: Pixelfed (Instagram alternative), Peertube (YouTube alternative), Pleroma (another Twitter-like microblog), Bookwyrm (Goodreads alternative), Funkwhale (like a mashup between Soundcloud and a podcast host), Owncast (Twitch alternative), Mobilizon (event organizing), lemmy (reddit alternative)...
They're all rather tiny and unpolished, having even less resources to work with than Mastodon, but you should be able to follow a user on any of them from Mastodon. At least in theory, haven't tried with all of them.
The annoying thing in my opinion is that you can't have a set-in-stone identity and then use different frontends for different purposes, kind of like you can on Facebook for groups/events/marketplace/stories. You have to have an account on all of them to make use of all features, even though they're all relying on the same protocol to a certain extent.
I like that he sees that ActivityPub should be so much more than Mastodon. "a truly universal timeline" of various things on the internet.
For that to happen we can't limit ourselves to just Mastodon, but start building alternative takes.
Yes, some aren't viewable on other clients, but that's fine, then they just show a link, but at least you can reply/reblog/like items.