I said the same thing even a few weeks ago, but the momentum for Mastodon is growing rapidly and it's really impressive to see, and Ivory is a very impressive client even in beta.
Almost everyone I followed on Twitter is using it now, and I actually prefer the experience. It's like Twitter but without all the bots/spam/hate, at least for now.
Server fragmentation is still kind of a pain point for Mastodon, but perhaps a better thing in the long term as it also gives us the ability to have a feed with more focused topics.
The good thing is most people I follow on Mastodon have stopped talking/complaining about Twitter unlike the first few weeks of the migration wave. The platform can only thrive when it hatches original content.
That’s not my experience at all. I follow all kinds of people I followed on Twitter before. And they use all kinds of instances (some even migrated from instance to instance – I wouldn’t have noticed if they hadn’t mentioned it).
Using Ivory my experience is eerily similar to Twitter. Why do you think it wouldn’t be? If a critical mass of interesting people is there it just works.
I don’t really use the local timeline at all, that‘s just not relevant to me.
Obviously this will be wildly different for everyone depending on how many people made the move. For me personally and how I used Twitter it just works (and Twitter proper was getting more and more deserted and uninteresting anyway).
I don't know why Mastodon is hyped up so much. I do not have an account on it as I have some concerns. My understanding at the current time is that a server can be run by a single random individual, they can read your DMs as they are not encrypted, and they can kick you off the server if you write anything the server operator does not agree with.
At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
> At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
"Rules and procedures" that didn't prevent a teen from hacking them a couple of years ago. The teen tricked Twitter employees to give their credentials, and the employee credentials gave him access to actual twitter accounts.WHich shows a singular lack of process and lax permissions practices from such a big company. And I'm not sure they'll fare better now that most of their workforce has been fired...
> At least with Twitter, it was a corporation with rules and procedures.
I would submit that was is a load-bearing word in that sentence. Twitter as it exists now effectively is run by a single random individual who can read your DMs and kick you off the server if you write anything he does not agree with. Bans have gotten weirder, stupider, and more mercurial since Musk's takeover (the Tweetbot/Twitterrific bans arguably being a particular case of it), and the "Twitter Files" are a result of him giving activist-journalists access to unencrypted DMs without permission. (I'm not interested in debating whether the subjects covered in the Files prove some kind of malfeasance on Twitter's part; that's orthogonal to the point I'm making here.) Twitter may have had rules and procedures a few months ago. Now it has Elon Musk making decisions by polls he pinky-swears to abide by the results of.
In practice, major, established Mastodon instances with tens of thousands of users may well be less likely to treat their users (and developers) as badly as current Twitter is.
>Twitter as it exists now effectively is run by a single random individual who can read your DMs and kick you off the server if you write anything he does not agree with.
I wouldn't count it as a benefit for Mastodon that its servers basically have the same form of management as Elon Musk Twitter.
> My understanding at the current time is that a server can be run by a single random individual, they can read your DMs as they are not encrypted, and they can kick you off the server if you write anything the server operator does not agree with.
Yes, just like any service on the Internet. I really don’t understand how the fact that anybody can run a Mastodon/Web/email/whatever server makes the whole thing not reliable; you just have to choose a server that suits you.
I don't really understand this argument. DMs on Twitter aren't encrypted. Now Elon can go read them. Same with kicking you off. With Twitter you're done. At least with Mastodon you can go to another server.
You can even run your own server if you want. But, if you're being a jerk your server might get de-federated.
Among tech-folk, it's hyped up because it's federated, with the hope that if it succeeds it brings us back to the original design of internet services like E-mail and Usenet where everything isn't centralized and owned by a single corporation where you have to live by the whims of it's advertisers.
> they can read your DMs as they are not encrypted
I have yet to send or receive a DM on Mastodon, I'm not even sure how you do it. As long as you know this fact, just don't send sensitive info in DMs? It's not a core feature of the platform so I don't understand why it's looked at as such a deal-breaker.
> they can kick you off the server if you write anything the server operator does not agree with
But, with Mastodon, you can just join another server with different rules if that happens. On Twitter, if you offend Elon, he kicks you off and now you have no recourse. Mastodon is strictly better in this regard.
On twitter I followed 1004 people, and was followed by 680. Mastodon: following 381 and followed by 202. They're across lots of instances; it doesn't make a significant difference.
I'm finding Mastodon generally better than Twitter a few months ago, and far better than Twitter today. The "For You" thing Twitter keeps shoving at me is just _nonsense_, and the "Following" section is a bit of a howling wasteland a this point.
> Mastadon is more like Discord than Twitter. There is no core server. There is no core experience. It's just an instanced message board
Have you ever actually _used_ it? This seems like a peculiar view of it.
From your description I’m not sure you understand Mastodon. People who don’t know about it and read your description will get the wrong impression, at least.
You can follow someone on any Mastodon server from your account on any server. It’s not siloed like Discord (which, ironically, actually is a centralized service!) - it’s much more like Twitter than Discord in real use.
There may be no official ‘core experience’, but there is a de-facto ‘core experience’: a stream of posts from people you follow, from any server, in chronological order.
I agree with everything you said, and also want to point out Twitter doesn't really have much of a "core experience" shared across its entire userbase either. Trending topics and promoted tweets on Twitter are largely determined by your language, location, who you follow, and interests Twitter has determined you have. You and another Twitter user are going to see very different content shown to you even beyond the things you subscribe to.
There’s a way to migrate your account to another server, including keeping follower relationships intact (so people don’t need to follow you again - they’ll automatically follow the new account). Past posts don’t get migrated though. If the old server is still running your past posts remain there.
If the server just suddenly shuts down with no notice, though, there’s nothing you can do.
I use the standard mastodon client and follow people on many different servers. I was surprised, but most everyone I followed on Twitter moved - even the non-techies.
It feels exactly like Twitter to me now, except less noise.
Almost everyone I followed on Twitter is using it now, and I actually prefer the experience. It's like Twitter but without all the bots/spam/hate, at least for now.