Federation in social networks

Posted Dec 13, 2017 3:16 UTC (Wed) by unixbhaskar (guest, #44758)
Parent article: Federation in social networks

Mastodon never excites me...maybe I failed to grasp the "intelligence" built in it...heck ..plus the interface is awfully stupid and bogus.

500 characters are okay though. I don't understand one thing, why the hell people design something which a pain to use as an end user???

What you mean by having separate instances?? forking??? where they reside?? same server..different server? same network?? different network???

YMMV

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Federation in social networks

Posted Dec 13, 2017 5:30 UTC (Wed) by tscs37 (guest, #114508) [Link]

Seperate Mastodon instances are generally not run on the same server (but could be), each instance has it's own users and timeline and it can interact with any other Mastodon server out there. So if Alice is on the Instance example.com and Bob is using initrode.com then they can both interact with eachother as though there both shared the same server like on Twitter.

I find this vastly superior to the way Twitter works since they only have one set of rules which may not be compatible with some cultures in the world.

Federation in social networks

Posted Dec 13, 2017 12:06 UTC (Wed) by darwish (guest, #102479) [Link]

The last thing we need at this stage is bike-shedding, especially at this very weak point-in-time where we don't have true open-source alternative for social systems.

I see Mastodon now mentioned in The Verge, Wired, etc. with some sponsors. Honestly, that's something the technically-OK but always-horribly-of-style GNU solutions will ever achieve.

Exposure, communication, and a good hip style is mandatory for a free-software social service to succeed, and it seems Mastodon hits the three remarkably. I guess being a Ruby-on-Rails project, where such community has excellent Web expertise and "hip" factor, is directly correlated to why they've been able to achieve the three factors.

So yes, YMMV, but I would really appreciate being less cynical and bike-sheddy about the whole affair. Society is in a dire need for something like this.

Federation in social networks

Posted Dec 13, 2017 13:45 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

You could do your own research, mind you. It's not that terribly confusing when you do.