Suggestions for an iOS/iPadOS Mastodon app?

Software
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41

This is what I am really struggling with. It has always been possible… and still is… to control what you see on Twitter.

One of the most often repeated phrases I have seen about Mastodon is “No algorithm!” I haven’t been subject to the Twitter algorithm ever. I see tweets from people I follow, in chronological order, with some content removed by filters.

Granted, if you are well known, people will come at you and that is a lot harder to deal with, but I don’t see how Mastodon will change that. Per my comment above… when the people arrive, so will the problems. No amount of moderation by scores of admins will be enough, in my view. Ironically, if Twitter had a leadership with the will, they’d have a far better chance of success in keeping “the bad” off the platform.

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42

It’s all about eyeballs. If “the bad” keeps people scrolling, arguing, etc. that’s what there will be.

43

I see gaps, tweets posted ut of order, and tweets from people/organisations I don’t follow shoved into my timeline. I don’t mind that much (I know full well that the Other Place has always been a commercial outfit), but it does happen.

It’s 2-edged, because in Mastodon everything is in strict chronological order (server glitches aside), which can make it harder to follow a thread, Threading and following threads is easier in the Other Place.

The Mastodon structure will help - mods can block entire servers as well as individual users, and they’re more responsive to reports than Twitter ever was. Big corps can set up their own instances (and probably will, and we can block them. It won’t be perfect, but better than what we have.

The will conflicts with the need for income - outrage and anger drive engagement - it’s in their interests to promote that. The new ownership seems to be careering even farther down that path

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And who is financing the work of this mods?

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We are, one way or another. At least each instance can find its own funding (might be donations, might be corporate, might be directly commercial) and we get to choose servers that use a model we like.

For now, donations and sponsorship look like the way to go. Or we can set up own servers for cheap and share the load

46

Yep! I really like this model and hope that it will be sustainable in the long run. I joined a relatively small instance social.coop because I like cooperatives. I read through their rules, with which I agreed. I applied to be a member and paid some yearly dues. The nice thing about the decentralized instances is that each one provides its own guidelines and moderation. In fact, just yesterday I reported my first instance for blocking and it was blocked. Three hours later if you consider that there are a lot of small to medium size instances, and that they are all providing their own moderation based on users input it seems to be proving to be a very successful method of keeping things in check.

All that said, I don’t know how things will go on the very large instances or how they are managing moderation. I believe the nice guy that runs mastodon.social is always recruiting new people to come help out with moderation and I know he has a Patreon for funding thus far things seem to be going pretty well for him aside from a few slow downs at the peak of the influx of Twitter folk.

47

Only on instances that allow it/encourage it. Other instances can block them. Trump’s Truth Social is a Mastodon instance, but not federated by most of the others

48

Most mods are volunteers. You can (and should if you afford to do so) help meet server costs, which are related to the server you’re on, but not all servers request donations (just depends who they are run by). E.g. MIT has a server which they fund, the EU has set up a server, etc. My friends and I are currently discussing setting one up which we will just fund ourselves.

The org that developed Mastodon itself is a not-for-profit and is funded by sponsorship. Even if it could be sold to someone like Elon Musk, it wouldn’t do much since the servers are not under their control.

There’s little danger of commercial entities become a pest on Mastodon, it’s just not really possible with the way the system is set up. Let’s say Ikea wants to use Mastodon. In order to access users in the same way they do on Twitter (or FB), they’d have to create an account for every server. Even if this was possible it would be a ridiculous thing to do, but it’s not possible because many servers are private or have rules to prevent this (and active mods who would remove offending accounts).

There are “bad places” on Mastodon, but they’re mostly isolated servers that other servers have separated from, and thus they can’t interact with anyone except other bad places.

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49

I’d be wary about calling him “nice”. He’s recruiting new mods because he fired all his old ones, he’s not blocked users that have been blocked from other servers for being known problems, and has not defederated (separated) from known fascist servers. As a result, some servers are having to silence or defederate from .social to protect their own users from toxicity. Which is a shame because it’s where a lot of newbies start and it makes it harder for them to find other content they might like, but it’s entirely down to poor management. Servers that don’t moderate properly will end up isolated by servers that do.

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50

I actually meant Twitter, but I didn’t word it carefully.

51

I disagree. I have always used a third party client for Twitter and it seems there are multiple ways to “thread” on Twitter, which means the client only manages to thread together some, not all. But then using the “official” app the threads pollute my timeline needlessly. If I don’t want to see the whole thread, I have to scroll past the whole thing. In Tweetbot, as with most Mastodon clients, the thread is easily readable by a simple action on the tweet/toot.

More responsive now. When things get to Twitter scale… let’s see.

Yeah, I’m not at all saying this would happen. I’m saying the centralised control and a massive staff make it technically easier to do.

52

And there is the reason, why the Mastodon Approach will not be working, if the number of user increase dramatically, while Twitter is hunted down by its new owner.
Mastodon seems to be something, that works in a ideal world, but not in a world with all those Fake News, Fascists, Terrorists, and what ever else is swimming in that big lake, if there are a couple of Million user.
Twitter only worked for so long, because there were several thousands employees, who tried to do their best, to keep the most negative influences out of the Timelines. And this only worked, because there were at the end only one instance (the Twitter Management) who defined the rules, and toke care of their fulfillment.
This will be not working at Mastodon.
There are way to many independently operated server out there, that it will be possible, to keep the negative server out of the Air. And who is defining, what there will be a “negative” server (or whoever this would be called), and what not?
Right now, the number of Mastodon User (1.3 Mio) equal only 0.5% of the number of current Twitter User (240 Mio).
Mastodon is currently increasing the number of User by currently 10% - EVERY DAY!!
And there are already massiv problems with Bad server out there.

Where will this end, if every small group of Fascist, MAGA, Russian, North Korean and who ever else wants to spread their poison into the world, could operate own server, and renew them every time the old ones would be blocked, within minutes!?

A Social Network like this needs a centralized structure, and a kind of Trafficpolice, who takes care of the persons who join, the informations they share, and the Serverstructur, everything is based on.
Everything else is maybe working with a couple of thousand members, but not with 3-digit-millions, or even more!

53

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federated infrastructure works. Firstly, although X million people are now using Mastadon, they’re not in one “global” place like users are on Twitter. They are spread across many separate “groups” (I.e. servers) - mods are not having to deal with millions of accounts; each mod is only responsible for their own “group”. The server I’m currently on for example has 30k users, has suspended new sign-ups and is focussed only with “onboarding” the newbies and getting them used to our way of working. I’ve not seen data but I assume this is quite a large server by some standards, and many probably closed with smaller numbers.

Secondly, if bad actors were to start rapidly creating new servers, they’d have very little immediate impact on other servers. The only way to view the “whole” network is to switch to federated view (it doesn’t show you the “entire” Mastodon network - only the other servers your server is federated with), which I’m guessing most users don’t do since there’s little value. By the time a server starts becoming a problem, it’s likely already been spotted by mods and action is being taken to protect their server.

And thirdly, private servers may only federate with a couple of other servers they like, and may be invite only. As such, the threat of outside influence is significantly reduced. For example, 5 servers might be “sister servers” and federate with each other but not with the wider Mastodon community, leaving them free from outside influence.

It’s short-sighted to believe this sort of network doesn’t work. Aside from the fact such networks have existed since the early days of the internet, they have also existed for many centuries in “real” life. Many communal organisations in Europe are federated, in the sense that they’re individual local groups and “police” their own activity, whilst also aligning with other groups and when needed regulating their association with or behaviour of others. In my town for example the town’s churches are in this sense federated; they don’t belong to the same organisations (one is catholic, another Protestant, etc.), and they don’t have any say in how each individual church is run, but they are united under a common aim and help each other as needed (and would break ties if something bad happened). The United States started out as an independent nation a similar way with what was essentially a federated group of states. The EU operates on similar principles (everyone agrees to overarching aspirations, but the EU doesn’t police what happens in individual member states; that’s the responsibility of each state).

Twitter is a poor example if you wish to suggest centralised infrastructure is needed, since if their structure had worked the app wouldn’t have been in decline for several years, most users wouldn’t have experienced or witnessed harassment at some point, and it wouldn’t crumble in less than a month due to the actions of one person.

When Twitter was new people didn’t know how to use it, and we’ve changed our behaviours in time to match what Twitter offered (e.g. shifting our tweets from 140 characters to 280 characters when Twitter changed the limits). The people who want to be on Mastodon will figure it out in the same way. And no-one is being forced to move of course, there are plenty of social media apps out there! I don’t think I’ve even ever watched a TikTok, and I’ve got friends who have never used a forum!

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54

Oh, I understand that very well, I just live not in a bubble, where I think that everything is fine, as long as it is small enough.

And this is excactly the reason, why we do have so many problems in the world.
The people live only in their own universe, get only the informations from other people with alike opinions and knowledge, or be the victims of a few people who have the power to influence all other within their bubble.
The Religions you mentioned are a very good example for those structures, as there are the members, who are often “kept” within their community, and hear the pastor, priest, imam or whoever is standing in front, and telling everybody else, how they should behave and react.

A lot of people at the moment are rushing towards Mastodon, because they hope to get a kind of replacement for Twitter.
But Twitter, with all its problems and downsides, gave at least a chance to have a look outside those communities and bubbles, if people were looking a little bit around.
If Mastodon does not “allow” this, because the Admin of the single server are defining the “content of the World” then it is for sure not something that could replace a service like Twitter, and help spreading knowledge and (true!) Informations in the world, by letting people decide by their own, if they want to have a look onto the view of “the other side”, or a different opinion or way of life.

To keep (or transfer it into one!) the world a save place, we need a way to communicate and getting informations, outside our own narrow communities, to build an understanding of the other, and to enhance the education of the today very often poor educated populations of a lot of countries, which open the doors wide for the spreading of “Fake news” hate and pure lies, with the goal of establishing or ensuring the power of a group of only a few people over their communities or countries/regions.

I don´t know, if for example Poland and Hungary will agree with you on that… :rofl:
As long, as not everybody in a community (independent if there are 10 or 10 Mio. “Members”) agrees to a set of “universal rules”, it will not work over a period of time.
It does not matter, if a country like Hungary starts an Authocratiy within the EU, or a state like Texas or Arizona is “trowing the Federal out”.
Neither the EU, nor the US would survive a behavior like this, and this is the same with a social network like Twitter or Mastodon (if this will become a global player).
The “real” problems (everything before that were only some glitches) on Twitter startet within the last two weeks, as a company led by a group of people who grew into their positions, was suddenly led only by one person, who has an autocratic Management “approach”, and little knowledge how to run a business like that.

55

Mastodon Server A has created a community of Neo Nazis (this actually happened; I’ve changed names).

As their posts began appearing in the timelines of other servers, users blocked and reported them.

Servers started blocking Server A from participating in the network, the entire server. They were essentially siloed. Their server works, but posts don’t propagate to the rest of the network.

This is how NNTP servers worked, back in the day. This is how email servers work now; users and servers and IPs (and sometimes entire ASNs) on lists are blocked entirely. Their mail is refused (this is part of the anti spam protocols). This kind of data limiting was built into core protocols, decades ago. Commercial sties care about $$$, but research sites/unversities care about data.

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56

This has been the most fun week to be on twitter since the early days. I don’t understand why people are leaving, but they’re missing out. Way more laughter than yelling this week. Twitter has always been fine for me because I use lists (topic based) to read what I want from whom I want. All that’s happened this week is more hilarious absurdity in each of my lists. It’s been great.

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57

I know, and understand, that but this has to be done still by a human Mod/Admin. This might be working on a voluntary base with a couple of thousand Users, a handful of server and so on.
But it won’t with several million User and ten thousand (or more) server.
And it is not working, if they are using a kind of a server farm to spread their garbage.

And, despite I also use some other tricks to reduce SPAM effectively, I delete every day 3-500+ Mails from my Mail App. :thinking: :cry:

58

+1 for the Lists feature.

Also a shout out to the Twitterrific app for promoting a calmer ad-free experience.

59

Also, agreed on lists. The first thing I did when I joined Mastodon was to set up lists.

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60

Wikipedia is a powerful example of the great things that can be achieved by an all-volunteer workforce.

And open source is a powerful example of the great things that can be achieved by a hybrid workforce of some people being paid, and other people working as volunteers. And then there’s a third group of people who are paid to volunteer, which doesn’t even make sense and yet it happens.

Fifty years of neoliberalism has blinded us to the power of what people can achieve for love rather than money.

Yes, of course, people need and deserve to be paid, but for a lot of people the pay is not the motivation for the work. The pace simply enables the work.

Steve Jobs said he wasn’t making things to make money. He was making money to be able to make things.

I am cautiously excited about the fediverse, of which mastodon is most prominent example currently. I haven’t been excited about anything happening on the Internet for a while.

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