back to article Mastodon makes a major move amid Musk's multiple messes

Mastodon, the open source Twitter-like federated social network server, has issued a major release that adds features aimed at making life easier for new users. Version 4.2 – released Thursday, the first release Mastodon has deemed worthy of a blogged announcement since March 2022's version 3.5 – is billed as a "massive update …

  1. Neil Brown

    Fedi fun

    I’ve used Mastodon as a self-hosted fedi server for several years now and, while I wish the installation process was simpler, each update, including this one, has been smooth. Mine is a single-user instance, and it ran fine on a Raspberry Pi 4 for ages; now, it is on an Intel NUC and is coping better with the volume of traffic.

    I used both the fediverse and Twitter for several years, but I stopped using Twitter a few months back - for both fun and work stuff, the fediverse works really well for me.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Shame about Mastodon

    Lovely idea, but it's never gonna fly - too clunky as noted above. The X migration is heading to Bluesky. I note The Register has already built a nest there.

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge

      Re: Shame about Mastodon

      Why would everyone go to Bluesky if their moderation is as much of a bin fire as Musk's Xitter is?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        Well, it isn't. The moderation is like how Twitter used to be before the Musk ego landed. So that makes it a fairly easy choice.

        1. Dan 55 Silver badge

          Re: Shame about Mastodon

          I don't remember N-word user IDs being allowed on Twitter before Musk landed. After landing, certainly, just like Bluesky.

      2. Fogcat

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        I've thought about giving BlueSky a try - but it seems invites to join are a commodity (just check eBay!)

    2. ColonelDare

      Re: Shame about Mastodon

      Each to their own.

      The loose and flexible nature of the fediverse means that surely some instances will come, fail and go. Others will expand and thrive, not to become the dominant, and only, king beast owned by some detestable billionaire of a dubious nature.

      If the instance I am on becomes hosted or occupied by unpleasant people of malintent then I can go somewhere else and block them out, just like a town pub or meeting place that I no longer enjoy. This is the strength of the underlying design where migration is easy and optional which the commercial beasts put up road blocks and walled gardens to prevent.

      As a side note I also _like_ the lack (by design) of encrypted DMs. I don't need this and would use something else if I wanted to send you my bank details, also I presume it discourages perverts and insurectionists using the system.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        Same principles coming from Bluesky though right? It's a protocol, or at least aiming to be, that enables all kinds of platforms to plug in and cohabit. Difference is, your mum can figure it out and she won't need us to troubleshoot if every week. Mastodon doesn't tick them boxes. For me, that's why Mastodon stays niche.

        1. ianbetteridge

          Re: Shame about Mastodon

          The key point is "aiming to be". And to be honest, I would bet against that federated protocol being quietly forgotten as soon as their investors demand a return.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        I opened a Mastodon account in 2019 but rarely used it because it was mainly occupied by nerds. Nothing against nerds, I'm one myself, but I do have other topics of interest besides Python, or protocols, or filesystems.

        I started using it again early in 2022, not long before Musk starting making sounds about wishing to get on the Twitter board, and found it to be a much broader place. It finally felt like a full spectrum social network, not just techies. Mid 2022 I stopped using Twitter and noticed the mass exodus from Twitter on a daily basis. People I missed because I used to follow them on Twitter had moved to Mastodon, servers started creaking under the insane influx of new users (I believe there was a month where Mastodon gained as many users in a month as it had done in the six years prior) and Twitter refugees who had dipped their toes into Masto or hedged their bets between both now decided to stay.

        What was interesting to see was the massive exodus of scientists from Twitter to Mastodon, entire disciplines moved over. Or the InfoSec community. Or the Twitter economists community. That there is now serious momentum that wasn't there prior to 2022 can be seen by the German government, the EU, the Dutch government, and recently the Swiss government all hosting their own Mastodon accounts on their own Mastodon servers. With Twitter now behind a login, and soon perhaps even a paywall, Twitter is no longer the useful comms platform it used to be for them.

        Apart from some very interesting people what strikes me most is how different a platform can be if monetisation is not the most important aspect. The whole platform is built for users instead of shareholders. So, yes you can export all your data if your want to, nobody's trying to keep you in the network. You can read everything without needing an account or behind a paywall, you can even follow posts by people and businesses using RSS. There are no enragement inducing algorithms that are set up to force feed content that will make you angry. There's no self-censorship because a single wrong word will cause an angry Twitter-style pile-on.

        Anyway, here's some recommended follows: Marcus Hutchins, Ian Betteridge, Glyn Moody, Dare Obasanjo, and Baldur Bjarnason.

        1. Anonymous Coward
        2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

          Re: Shame about Mastodon

          Let's hope it stays that way too. I remember when Usenet was hosted on servers everywhere, pretty much every University, every ISP and many, many individuals were hosting servers and peering with pretty much anyone who requested to do so and, in many cases, only hosting the newsgroups they wanted to host, eg no binaries when they became a problem. It's an open protocol, plenty of free open source servers and clients, and yet it's on life support these days, There's a few islands of sanity still hosting "text only" servers and few "big boys" running full feed subscription services.

          Then again, it took many years before Usenet went from 1000's of independents to a few big commercial operators, so even of Mastodon evolves to a few "super servers" it should be a good few years down the line. Unless some "genius" finds a way to monetise it.

      3. simonlb Silver badge
        Trollface

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        Others will expand and thrive, not to become the dominant, and only, king beast owned by some detestable billionaire of a dubious nature.

        Nothing dubious about it, Musk is truly detestable and has worked hard to gain that reputation.

    3. ianbetteridge

      Re: Shame about Mastodon

      And all the same dreadful people who basically turned Twitter into a trash fire - grifters, homophobes, racists - are now landing on Bluesky and turning it into Twitter Mk 2. Where it's easy to block an entire instance full of Nazis with Mastodon, Bluesky makes it a one by one process (and if you think they are ever going to do federation, I have a bridge to sell to you).

      1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        Thats because aresholes for all time always want more. Dictators never want to just take over the street they live on they want the whole country etc. The same is here at BS, they want bigger and more, and in the end most will get nothing. Just like a big c ity, more people means more time wasted because of the masses, which means the more people actually have less space, less time and less everything ...

    4. Barry Rueger

      Re: Shame about Mastodon

      I'm liking Bluesky a lot, for the reasons, and people, that made Twitter so good. Thus far no nazis, and no trolls, but I'm still incredibly hard-nosed in curating my feed.

      My big question is how the heck Disney corp seems to be Twitter's biggest advertiser.

      1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        What makes you think Disney is pure as snow ? They are no different from Twitter.

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Shame about Mastodon

      BlueSky, where one of the two devs is also single-handedly responsible for the moderation?

      It's no surprise there have been so many complaints about the racism and Nazism on BlueSky. Don't believe me? Create an account with a photo of a black man in your profile and give it a few minutes. Or choose a Jewish sounding username.

      The problem with BlueSky is that it's created by yet another unhinged billionaire so moving from Twitter to BlueSky is moving from the frying pan into the fire. And when Jack Dorsey has a bad day he will fuck up BlueSky as much as he fucked up Twitter. Your basically just another hostage of some billionaire idiot.

      1. Arthur the cat Silver badge

        Re: Shame about Mastodon

        when Jack Dorsey has a bad day he will fuck up BlueSky as much as he fucked up Twitter

        I thought he'd given up on BlueSky and was pushing nostr(*) these days?

        (*) My inner childbrat wants to see a nostr relay in Israel.

  3. Pascal Monett Silver badge
    Trollface

    "making X pay to play"

    Oh yes, please ! Brilliant idea, Your Muskiness !

    Would you like a noose with that ?

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Brilliant idea, Your Muskiness !

      The cult of Musk will lap it up just like they are going to lap up this cybertruck thing. If those bozo's think that it will be bullet proof straight from the factory then I have this bridge in the middle of the Saudi 'empty quarter' to sell you.

      I can't wait for the first cult member to test this feature out. Duck Elon.... there will be a gazillion class actions on their way to you by drone.

      None of my work colleagues would now be seen dead on Twatter... (It will never be X to the majority of users.) The content is so vile that our network people have listed it as NSFW and blocked it.

      I guess that if you are a White Supremacist/KKK member, then it is the place for you but since Elon started cozying up to El Putin, it is not a safe place to be.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Brilliant idea, Your Muskiness !

        The Platform Formerly Known As Extant Twitter?

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Brilliant idea, Your Muskiness !

        I thought it was to prevent addicts from harming their career prospects.

  4. Terry 6 Silver badge

    Federation does work

    I've been on Masto for a while now. I've opted to register on three servers, a generic one, a Jewish one and a local one, but I didn't need to. The switch between them is seamless so I chose to do it that way. But I could just have kept to one and used the federated (I.e. most Twitter like) feed.

    The only drawback is the lack of institutional presence. I can't go to, say, Virgin Media's feed if they've messed up and publicly shame them. But then that long since ceased to be useful in Twitter anyway, Once the companies worked out how to cover that in corporate BS..

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Federation does work

      I've opted to register on three servers, a generic one, a Jewish one and a local one ...

      Where's the punch line?

      1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Federation does work

        They all walked into a bar, tripped over and said "Owww, that hurt".

        Yes, it was a very low bar.

        Ba-dum Tish.

        I'll be here all week.

  5. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "One way to understand Mastodon is to consider each instance as an email server that can talk to other email servers!

    Like Usenet?

    Nothing new under the sun.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I think it's fair to say that the past forty years have refined the concept a tad.

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        The word you're looking for might be "monetised".

    2. sabroni Silver badge
      Happy

      re: Nothing new under the sun.

      The only thing constant is change.

    3. Philo T Farnsworth Silver badge

      Bingo!

      Precisely my thought as read that. . . yay, you've just invented Usenet!

  6. breakfast

    A home for the locals?

    I feel like Mastodon would be a pretty good home for the small subset of Reg community members who don't snort huffily at the very concept of social media, being social at all, accessing the internet with anything newer than a dialup modem, and computers smaller than an IBM mainframe. The "complicated" nature of having to decide which server(s) to sign up to has resulted in a fairly tech-savvy community and if you search around there are plenty of funny and interesting people on there and interesting conversations.

    In the post-twitter world it might be the social media I have most fun with.

  7. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

    LIke most things today the bigger it gets the worse it gets.

    Cities bigger and more people, they become a shithole of wasted time in traffic or commuting or whatever.

    Celebrities and personality cults are another example of concentration being a bad thing.

    Prediction the bigger M gets the more it becomes like the very thing it wanted to replace or be an alternative.

    1. sabroni Silver badge

      Really?

      How does this federated protocol become the next Twitter? How does a billionaire buy it? What are you talking about?

      1. Andy 73 Silver badge

        Re: Really?

        If a social media site provides a genuinely useful, low cost way to talk to thousands of people, then it will be used by those who can profit from or abuse that ability. It doesn't need a billionaire owner to be a place that hosts disinformation, scams and high pressure commercial presences. Consider the vast quantities of spam that email handles - despite being truly federated and free from "billionaire owners".

        1. CowHorseFrog Silver badge

          Re: Really?

          If we balance the good vs the bad of social media, its hardly a surprise which end will easily outweight the other. Its phsyically impossible to talk to thousands of people, the only people who need this type of audience are aresholes who want to sell you some bullshit.

  8. John Robson Silver badge

    Still need a copy editor...

    "we've added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive"

    Pretty sure that should say rewritten rather than "rewrote".

    "We've rewrote copy and labels" is not proper english like what my grammar tawt me

    1. F. Frederick Skitty Silver badge

      Re: Still need a copy editor...

      It's two separate clauses separated by the "and".

      1. Jonathan Richards 1 Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: Still need a copy editor...

        >> we've added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive

        > It's two separate clauses separated by the "and"

        In which case the grammatical dissonance comes from the change of tense between the clauses, "we have added" is past perfect, and "[we] rewrote" is past tense. Replacing "rewrote" with "rewritten" would allow the second clause to benefit from the unspoken elision, so it would read as "we have added {noun phrase} and we have rewritten {different noun phrase}".

      2. John Robson Silver badge

        Re: Still need a copy editor...

        In which case switch tense properly...

        "we've added progress indicators to guide people through the multi-step sign-up process and [we] rewrote copy and labels to be more intuitive"

        I still think having whole sentence in the same case by replacing 'rewrote' with 'rewritten' is the cleanest correction.

  9. jpennycook
    Linux

    Fediverse is more than Mastodon

    There are services other than Mastodon in the Fediverse - including video sharing, image sharing, and even one that's like Goodreads for book tracking and reviews.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Maston wasn't built to go viral

    and so it will always be niche. And that's not a bad thing at all.

  11. steelpillow Silver badge
    Coat

    Federating the server administration?

    I foresee many a Mastodon server falling into decay as the admin loses interest, or just loses it.

    Maybe it needs a kind of one-stop-shop federated administration service. Kind of AI-ish in that it administers shedloads of servers, but driven by community consensus of the active admins (the Wikipedia model).

    Just a thought.

    1. richardcox13

      Re: Federating the server administration?

      Or the users move to another server: which is easy to do.

  12. Tron Silver badge

    This could have been so much easier.

    Why are geeks so bad at this? They really didn't need to introduce Linux-level complexity into it, killing it for retail customers.

    Just expand any e-mail client to handle rich content via encrypted packets of data. It would be distributed enough and could do 85% of social media yet still allows for permissive adverts and user-generated filters.

    1. Richard 12 Silver badge

      Re: This could have been so much easier.

      Email client?

      How many "retail customers" do you think have an email client other than Microsoft Outlook/Mail or the email app that came with their phone?

      Thunderbird has perhaps half a million users, and it's almost certainly the most popular 'other'.

      Unless you convinced Microsoft, Apple, Google, or (perhaps) Samsung to add it, no email client feature is ever going to be mass-market.

      A standalone app/webapp is literally the only option. It's also what a lot of (most?) people prefer - "everything" apps are often quite annoying as you have to go through many layers to find the thing.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Just one question about social media

    Why?

  14. coolhandle

    Cool but Toxic?

    The technology behind Mastodon seems kind of cool but I've heard the environment is toxic for conservatives. ie, there's a strong liberal bias and a lot of censorship. I'll stick to Twitter/X for now but if Musk makes it pay I have no problem living with out Twitter/X (or a clone).

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