Mastodon is retreading a lot of ground, but it's winning in two big ways that the federated socialweb hasn't before: diversity and niceness. By niceness I mean taking code of conduct type things seriously is a big thing from the beginning, affecting the culture. On diversity side, at least seems true gender-wise, it seems that without trying my timeline has become mostly women, people on lgbt spectrum and other underrepresented groups; unusual (in a good way) in a mostly techy space.
der.hans, Mike Linksvayer, Scott Sweeny likes this.
@cwebber@identi.ca idk, there were a lot of Persian speakers on the old identica. I mean you aren't totally wrong and n=2 does not make it not unusual but feel it worth noting
You're right, and I think there's clearly work to be done; while things seem good under gender and lgbt axes, there looks to be much to be done to improve representation amongst PoC participants. But there was a good amount of positive discussion about that there today.
The homepage image is an improvement over pump.io's too. :-) :-/ and whatever other emoticons you wish.
Mike Linksvayer at 2017-04-13T17:30:30Z
Christopher Allan Webber likes this.
some good cultural choices.
The initial release was 6 months ago in October 2016.
This is well after the need for social network with good moderation
tools was made painfully obvious by GamerGate and all the other forms
of harrasment that Twitter is unable or unwilling to deal with.
At least according to the user documentation Mastodon does have the
most anti-harrasment features implemented for a social networking server.
This provides the motivation for people to switch.
Additionally this is well after crowd funding has become known and
popular, so the lead developer for Mastodon has a decent revenue
stream https://www.patreon.com/user?u=619786 (for most of the country)
Lastly I think the "server local timeline" was a brilliant idea. It
looks like the mastodon instances are largely self organizing around
common communities.
https://github.com/tootsuite/documentation/blob/master/Using-Mastodon/List-of-Mastodon-instances.md
I was told in IRC that the server software is
tuned for around a few thousand users.
I think that's still in the range that you can get to know and
recognize most of the active users on a server. Its small enough that
people can reasonably be expected to say hi to new people, and to
recognize abusive users to be dealt with.
On my pump node I forgot to disable registrations and so a few
marketers tried to register. (I didn't have an easy way of seeing who
was joining)
These things allow Mastodon instances to creating a reasonably
welcoming community space that's likely to form some level of
community loyalty, which... thanks to the availability of crowd
funding infrastructure means there's a good chance that if the server
needs to be paid for it can be.
Diane Trout at 2017-04-13T18:12:27Z
Yutaka Niibe, der.hans, Mike Linksvayer, Charles Stanhope and 1 others likes this.