I think Mastodon (and any decentralized social media) needs to be easier to host. The thing is relatively a beast to get working, whether you try and install the dependencies separately on a distribution that's not Ubuntu (IIRC) or if you're not familiar with Docker. I host quite a few instances of things for myself but I gave up on Mastodon (I wasn't trying that hard, to be fair) after trouble getting it working behind the same reverse proxy everything else is behind.<p>If we could get a cross-platform, statically linked, near zero configuration social media tool where I essentially just have to forward a few ports, that'd be fantastic for me and I'd hope many others.<p>The biggest draw of something decentralization is being able to own and control all my data and having some stranger on the Internet rather than BigCorp own it is not meaningfully different to me.
I have looked into Mastadon several times, and I still don't understand what problem it is trying to solve.<p>* Replacing Twitter -- Part of the appeal of Twitter is that it __is__ centralized. I can find and discover arbitrary tweets or threads by popular people all in one place. On Mastadon, I, presumably, have to explore several different servers in order to find the people I want to follow, which throws up barriers against something Twitter does really well.<p>* Creating interesting communities that can interact with each other -- See IRC, Slack, Reddit, forums, Wordpress blogs, etc.<p>Honest question: what problem are they solving, and/or why should I use Mastadon instead of older platforms such as IRC or Reddit?
From the article:<p>> With around 100,000 users on mastodon.social — the biggest instance — it is just 0.03% the size of Twitter, and only growing at a rate of 1,000 users per week.
> To give you an idea of the scale compared to Twitter: Mastodon is 13 months old and at that same age, Twitter was around 10 times bigger.<p>The Mastodon Monitoring Project (<a href="https://mnm.social" rel="nofollow">https://mnm.social</a>) estimates 1,019,544 accounts across the nearly 2300 instances it knows about. Around ten times bigger than the number this person was comparing to Twitter.<p>I guess that means Mastodon is growing about as fast as Twitter did!
Mastodon 2.0 speaks ActivityPub now! <a href="https://activitypub.com/" rel="nofollow">https://activitypub.com/</a><p>I made the world's first public ActivityPub implementation a little over a year ago: <a href="https://distbin.com" rel="nofollow">https://distbin.com</a><p>Now I have <a href="https://mastodon.bengo.is" rel="nofollow">https://mastodon.bengo.is</a><p>Now I need to iron out interoperability bugs: But I look forward to the day that you can respond to a mastodon post anonymously via distbin, and vice-versa. And on both sides the conversation should render as threaded, etc.