Distributed social media - Mastodon & Fediverse Explained
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- Опубліковано 4 бер 2019
- Mastodon is a "federated" social network that works like Twitter. It puts the control of data into the user's hands, not in a single corporation.
Mastodon uses ActivityPub to make sure that each Mastodon instance can reach the others.
ActivityPub is also implemented by other applications such as PeerTube and Plume. This is what makes up the *Fediverse*: a collection of social networks that function as a single one.
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The Future belongs to Open Source.
yeah but most of "decentralized" services don't have the way to make money since they don't atrac content creators,influencers etc. and mostly get left behind
@@phoneemail2907 the cost of decentralization is mitigated by not having the operation costs of a centralized server.
Until Microsoft buys it of course...
@@phoneemail2907 Speed is another major issue. Without edge servers, many videos would be virtually unwatchable. But these are more like problems to be solved, rather than obstacles. The obstacles would be government "regulation". I can see crackdowns on anything opensource coming up. The fascists will simply not allow it.
@@animanoir that's actually not possible with decentralized sites. Try again.
"Has grown exponentially" : shows linear growth
But federated social should be the default for everyone. Agreed.
Exponential growth has gone out of favor, I wonder why.
because that line represent combined growth not growth it self, which is actually a Gauss bell that does look exponential during the first half.
It’s on logarithmic scale for vertical axis
Expolinearly 🧠
It's crazy to see this video was made 4 years ago, before covid, and is now a great source to explain federated websites after the Reddit/Twitter updates recently. Thanks for the great video (4 years late!) Hoping youtube remains a safe space for content.
youtube a safespace for content? hohhohihihahaha
The fact that this channel was talking about this 3 years ago is a great testiment to the quality of the channel. If you want to learn about the cutting edge, definetly consider subscribing.
Very good development. Thanks for this informative content. Adoption requires marketing and users themselves can spread the good word. We need to uproot the evil social media monopolies.
Terrible for freedom of speech. If you dare to disagree with the leftists you'll be called Nazi and banned right away.
@@slimshady8456 Trust me when I say there are plenty of right wing Mastodon instances that may tickle your fancy. If you can't find any you can also make your own instance with all the freedoms you wish to enjoy
@@slimshady8456 which ones ??
@@Moodboard39 Gab and Truth Social (two of the biggest right-wing social networking sites that are still currently up) both happen to be Mastodon instances. Though most Mastodon instances have them blocked as default. Server admins can choose to block certain instances, and even as a user you can block instances if they happen to be too much for you.
It's not so much that the big social media platforms (including UA-cam) have rules, but that they often don't tell you exactly what the rules are or that they apply the rules in an inconsistent way - penalizing some groups and not others for the same supposedly prohibited behaviour.
This is a common authoritarian practice: the vaguer your rules, the more subjectivity you can exercise in enforcing them.
Thanks for this explanation, it is, 3 years later, still a very good start for new users!
So this video explains the sudden bump of mastodon users a couple of days ago :)
Very informative and well explained. Explained in a simple language that can be understood even by those who are not very knowledgable about blockchain technology. Great content!
Oh amazing video, thanks! Been looking for an out from today's "internet" to the golden age of internet, this looks more like it!
Very helpful video. I just learned about Mastodon (and the Fediverse) today, so I am starting from ground zero, and your video is excellent as a first orientation. I like the idea because decentralization is powerful - decentralization generally results in resilience and encourages innovation. Centralized structures in general lack flexibility, and the bigger they are, the less flexible they become - and as a result often actively and deliberately stifle innovation. Thanks for the video.
thanks for the great intro video, i've been moving over to peertube, pixelfed, mastodon, and discovering more. it's beautiful and exciting and will try to get my communities to move over.
About the last point. I know of two instances off hand where members of the community can set up monthly donations to the site, and in return they get to be voteing members of the governing body that runs the instance. It's a niche possibility yes, and mostly works because these instances are aimed at the kind of person who would like that idea, but it is A way of handling server fees without ads.
Great great great video. Sharing it with my friends! I don't know what is your channel about, but the privacy and decentralization themes are aewsome! Good luck with your channel!
Thanks a lot! The channel used to be about tech tutorials. Now it's more about explaining things I find interesting ;)
Nice. I like the presentation. For reasons, I have been participating on a Mastodon instance for a while now, but the whole thing has been a mystery to me. This helps lift at least a bit of the fog.
It might be better to include some general terminology in the video title. Since I clicked on this video randomly, since I was bored and found it pretty interesting. But I had no idea what it was about before clicking. I think if it said "Decentralized Social Media - Mastodon & The Fediverse Explained" or something of the sort, I'd have been much more likely to click on it, since I have an idea what the video is about before clicking. As currently, the video may as well have no title from the perspective of someone who doesn't know what Mastodon or the Fediverse is. Maybe the thumbnail could also be utilized to add the general terminology too.
Wow, you are 100% correct! I've changed the title to what you suggested. It's way better! I should put a bit more time in coming up with a good title and thumbnail. Right now I mainly focus on the content, but as you pointed out: that's worth nothing if people don't click on it. Thanks again man! Really appreciate your feedback!
Exactly! The content is great and the title and thumbnail usually need to have the same care and consideration, since it's the first thing people see. You need to capture something relatable and that people can understand to incite interest, but not dumbing it down too much or being misleading. It can be difficult sometimes.
Thank you for this video! Will definitely sign up and follow you
Thank you!
Great and simple explanation.
I joined mastadon, part of the Great Indian Twitter exodus.
Really great video! Think you got me sold on this idea.
Excellent explainer video thank you! And yes have been looking into joining the Fediverse.
I'm pretty new to Mastodon and I really like it, although I'm still a bit confused. I wish there would be an easy way to see the timelines of other instances (if the admins approve it). And more filter options like sorting for a specific language would be a killer. Nevertheless, great recap. Thanks for the upload!
Awesome tutorial. Thank you - sharing it with my friends!
Solid video, thank you! What a cool technology.
This info is pure gold! Thanks
I signed on to Fediverse instances. It is great to be able to follow people on other platforms without needing an account on that platform.
The only item that I miss, and dearly miss, is that in the comments on a post or a video, you do not see the comments that were made by people who are registered on another 'instance' than you are. That is something that has to change. The keyword of Social Media is 'social', but what is social when you can follow people on other platforms or instances but you can communicate (comment) only with the people that are on your own instance? Then we return to the situation that one; the largest, platform (instance) will eventually get the most new users which goes against the objective of decentralisation that Fediverse tries to achieve
Your instance might be limited or blocked by other admins for some reason. Ask the FediTips account for help with this.
@@anneahlert2997 Thanks. The problem is largely solved now. I think that it now only applies to a, very limited, number of non-federated instances.
Great job explaining the topic, I think I'll give it a try.
Great video. I’m looking into Mastodon myself.
Many thanks. You explained it superbly.
Already have one now we need more of this!
This platform should be picking up steam pretty soon since de-platforming has become commonplace on other platforms. Server location and access may be of interest and more people may be more willing to pay and/or donate and learn new ways to communicate with more people.
Prophetic. Elon Musk pushed people off of Twitter, and Mastodon has grown by leaps and bounds. The huge spike began when Elon took over, but lately has reached peak number of almost half a million new accounts opened in the past week alone (July, 2023), and it isn't slowing down.
This is simply beautiful
in the last you have said that you create a video of setup mastodon. I will eagerly wait for that . nice video
yes, very likely I will install this on my server - great intro, great product!
Got a link?
I need to create my own ...
Thanks for the explanation.
I hope to boost this video with this comment as social media decentralization is more relevant than ever nowadays.
Thank you for the donation! The video is certainly getting more traction after Elon bought Twitter.
This is amazing! Going to try to set up my own instance soon.
hey Gireesh, been 10 months. Did you set up your instance?
it’s been a year he died
I leaned so much about it from this video
There are many things I was ignoring
Threads getting into the fediverse gon change entrepreneurs lifes
Pretty interesting! Good video.
Well explained, love your content 👌
(And, first)
Why have I not heard of this before????
Very helpful , thank you
This is excellent! Found your video when I went looking for a way to explain the Fediverse to my friends without having to make a video myself. 😀 Question, did you animate this yourself? If so I would love to know what tool you used. Smooth and clear presentation. 👍👍
Super helpful thank you
APub actually is born as an improvement over OStatus (used by GNU Social), and Mastodon actually used OStatus before adding APub support. Some speculate that the Tweetdeck-like UI might have contributed to Mastodon's success.
Then again, this is way too technical for a UA-cam video.
Already there.. Great video.. :-)
I was 5 seconds into the video and I was like "I know this accent ... but from where?" and the channel is Belgian. That explains it.
Nice video btw.
Good video. Thanks!
Interesting, I will go for mastodon :) .... and see :)
That decentralized apps are great! But the problem is that there some of them are still seperated.
Some of them are Mastodon (and other compatible apps), ZeroNet, Steem... There are also many "storage" providers like Storj, OrbitDB, IPFS, 3Box, blockchains... And it is also same for identify services.
All of them have some advantages and disadvantages so it would be great if they would be able to communicate and work with each other.
the idea of the fediverse / activitypub reminds me of SoLiD (social linked data)
Well explained
nice hope more people support this
Yea
This is awesome, still don't get how the interactivity between the instances works too, but i'll search more for it it's really interesting.
it's like websites emailing each other. every action is encoded as an "activity" and sent to your followers. "alice created a note", "bob created a note inReplyTo alice's note", etc.
This is great info. Do you know if decentralized platforms use the activity pub protocol as well??
amazing!
Always looking for alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. Free exchange of information and ideas is under attack by these platforms which have gotten too big and powerful.
Really appreciate the explanation of the fediverse along with Mastodon.
Gonna join this
well done
Very well
It maybe an idea that a federated secure micro payment system is set up so those who support the Fediverse through hosting servers can get money through donations or even payment for bandwidth, storage, and so on.
Otherwise it will be dependent on the purely goodwill of server providers.
I notice on UA-cam livestreams for instance for a small payment people get a special thanks etc.
Almost all Fediverse Admins have some kind of GoFundMe or funding system set up. Like PBS television in the USA, people can make donations to support their instance & admins; some even arrange for people to be able to contribute as regular subscribers.
sell a Fediverserout of the Box Pod made from a standard case and a RaspberyPi . Flash it with a first start routine to setup the instance made for just your families accounts. Add Next cloud and an option for massstorage.
Have it connected to an inbound Dynamic Domain name service or have it beeing able to refresh an A-Record without configurating the router.
i hit like before I watch
Thanks
A good ad system for the fediverse is to use brave ads and get BAT as revenue. So users that have ads turned on on brave can donate to each instance like 5 BAT automatically.
Pleroma is better. The server software is lighter, which means it's easier to run a node for yourself. Another problem with mastodon is the culture of mass-defederating slightly right wing nodes (look up #fediblock). So I'd say pleroma is generally more free.
so its basicly Upgraded or Remastered Version and Imrpoved RSS feed? i mean that tech seems fascinating for me who grow up in Late DvD/BluRay era and Early Smartphone Era
Threads are going to do it now, what Mastodon has done 5 years back !!
Friendica is awesome, you can follow RSS, so you can see instagram and twitter post in your feed among the post on the fediverse.
The worst part of Mastodon is that they call their tweets "toots." That'd be weird when they show up in the news. "Congressman [name] recently tooted that they think natural gas should be taxed."
They probably meant the noise pachyderms make with their trunks, which is technically "bugling". They can definately "toot" out the other end too, but it might be infrasonic.
I'm trying to show a healthy interest in this, but did everyone miss the "Join us, or be left out" part? That HAS to be bad no? Were they referring to other platforms?
They need to charge a monthly subscription to each platform. Not a crazy amount but one to allow the project to grow. Its worth it not having adds and the freedom!
Gets expensive if you need to instance jump frequently.
I know some users that have accounts on upwards to 20 or so instances.
We need to have options for how we individually choose to sort out funding for our nodes.
"Social media networks have grown exponentially"
*shows a graph with a linear gradient*
Great job, lol
I'd say this is only partial decentralization here since you still need rely on "servers" and hosting of "instances" (with fixed addresses). The key would be running a service on virtual servers or an anonymous network like a cloud. It seems to me that no matter what source the programming you can't escape the basics: Server networking vs. Peer to Peer sharing (in some form or other) and frankly we need an alternative for both.
You could easily establish a personal server and use that to interact with the broader network
@@Jackissoocool The latest innovation (and maybe a step in the right direction) is something like LBRY - they segment and encrypt the general data into various 'layers' (parts) and place only the shell core into a secured Bitchain ledger. The idea of being both decentralized and relatively anonymous... tho they still they fail in both as this still needs a propretior master 'key' which points to you (id or identity) in the records kept online.
@@almarshall1452 I'm not convinced LBRY is a truly decentralized alternative. I think we just need to get the hell away from technology and provide for ourselves.
I've seen a few instances where LBRY removed content. I think this is the best option we have at this point. If we want to continue using some type of network, there will always be a possibility of one of the instances censoring content.
Time to say fuck technology and work on becoming self sufficient imo.
I'll be hosting a pleroma instance until then, while I work on self sufficiency
@@mynameisearlb I was recently looking into IPFS (Interplanetary File System) as a possible viable alternative - and it’s clear this one falls in the peer-to-peer category with nodes. While being decentralized and difficult to enforce any censorship it seems to have the usual security risks as peers can be tracked and identified on the ‘network’ no matter how large and widespread it is. Unstoppable Domains is also an interesting candidate (in the decentralized category) but this one is not free and can only be accessed with special plug-ins and resembles TOR in many ways (hard to access and needing proprietary software components). The best solution may be peer-to-peer infinite modules (for the content creation side) gathered on the fly impossible to trace or stop and some blockchain cloud server (for storage of data) that would be free to use with no IP tracing. As for these other so-called ‘uncensorable’ ‘unmoderated’ networks that encourage ‘whales’ or ‘good-standing’ they are a scam of sorts since all they do is ‘track’ and ‘trace’ you to be ‘certified’ and ‘promoted’ sigh.
@@Jackissoocool vps?
How were they able to find your Toot? I think that's where I'm confused. Were they on PeerTube and it popped up? Was it them on a specific Mastodon instance? In your example where you say a Mastodon instance could say no cats, how would it know if a post had a cat?
Toots are by default visible on the public timeline. An account with no followers is visible to everyone else on the same instance. The first user to interact with it increases the 'visible surface' of the post because then everyone that follows that person can see the first person's post, for each individual user to interact. The first time a user on another instance see's it, it shows up on their server's public timeline as well.
Ultimately it would take about 30 minutes at most for a post to make it's rounds around the entire fediverse, depending on who interacts with it.
this was the comment i was looking for to preclude me from typing it out myself🤣...very perplexing concept indeed...
Toots now Publish in the latest software release -- latest version of Mastodon - 4.0.0
Oooo please do OpenBazaar network and app / Haven app.
mastodon just surpassed 8million accounts
Now this video needs to surpass 8 million views ;)
@@simplyexplained hahahahaha
Are Mastodon & Fediverse the new Fidonet (90's BBS) ????
to the fediverse!
I don't think that monetization is really a problem.
A small cloud-virtual-server-whatever costs from EUR 2,- up to lets say EUR 10 to 15,- per month, if you have a larger community.
I think this amount of money is easily obtainable direct from within the community.
yes, it is not automated, but that's also the end of that.
To me the major issue is understanding (in contrast to centralized server like FB and Twitter it is not easy to grasp the difference for the general user) and adaption.
GNU Social is a great federated social network.
I joined mastadon but pixelfed isnt' up yet
I have a question, how is selling ads not possible if it is self hosted? Could someone not use mastodon to create their own social media with ad integration? is it against their TOS, or something in their license?
I’ll support anything that’s kosher free.
VERY COOL! But correct me if I'm wrong - one can now run a PERSONAL SERVER with almost any modern ISP for no increase in cost over the usual information tap and barrels. So it sounds like my user group: oh - model train enthusiasts of Southern California (of which I know of about four local chapters) - would fit right in. Local engineering clubs, designing clubs ... I hesitate to go further to avoid a circuit blow -- but all would now be inside a welcoming environment that is basically controlled by "Freds" and "Jeanies" - as always. And essentially free-for-time. YEP?
Okay, of course, hmmm - somebody else please do an analysis of hosting topical video media - cause that's not cheap - yet.
LEMMY
Another reason why it is popular in Japan might be because it was coded in ruby, and the creator of ruby is Japanese.
Why are ads not possible? I'm very interested in making my website part of the Fediverse.
probably need the concept of Fediadverse, Federated Ads Universe
with mastodon can we use it to add admin to manage our account like tweetdeck?
if can, how? please give me tutorial or explanation thank you
Also, can I sign up on one Mastodon instance and then use my profile on another or on PeerTub?
Yep. If you find a PeerTube video you like and you are logged in to your mastodon account on the same browser you can post comments on the peertube video and subscribe to them without your own peertube account.
@@MrControll But can I also publish new video (and use all other features) with Mastodon account?
@@filipstamcar6553 Sadly no.
@@MrControll It is possible to suggest this feature to ActivityPub developers? It would be very useful.
@@filipstamcar6553 If there is a way I don't know how...
sound good, but without money how can an instance survive?
how do I create an instance of mastodon?
*Funkwhale is for music
GET FEDERATED!
How does this work? Do you query results from all servers or only those you follow? The former seems stupid, while the latter sounds like it would result in a reddit-like system, with gated communities and ban-happy mods.
The latter! The difference between APub and Reddit is that, unless your admin sets an instance-wide ban, once you follow an account the _whole server_ sees that account.
Ban-happy mods can indeed block a lot of instances from appearing, but a significant amount does talk with everyone that doesn't invite legal trouble. This way, switching instances can switch between a free/safe speech view.
also you can make your own site if you don't want someone else to mod for you.
I like the idea, but I'm not a fan of the current UI, and I don't like that I have to choose which instance I have to act as when boosting a post etc. For example, the full handles are too long to remember, and I'd like it to go to all instances. There also needs to be an autofill for those handles.
you don't just claim a name everywhere. do you sign up to every single email service ever? do you email every address in existence? no, you use one address and you send to your followers.
also, there are other UIs available. the client APIs are open, like twitter used to be before locking itself down.
@@obvious_humor I'm not saying I want to have the same handle everywhere. My issue is that I have to have a password for each of them. Password managers help but don't fix the issue.
@@deoxal7947 so you want one account to access multiple profiles?
@@obvious_humor Something like that, probably in the form of a browser extension.
@@deoxal7947 nothing is stopping you from developing one
Something that I don't understand is what happens when the server you where suddenly dies. All your history and data dies too?
Store in dats storage
Sociall is also cool though
So these instances are run by random people right? what if one instance shuts down? Is all our data on it lost?
correct. Your data is lost. Though Mastodon afaik allows you to export follows, favs, etc.
@@xE92vD In that case it seems really risky, most closed source platforms have proper funding and infrastructure to have multiple backups incase any accident happens. In fediverse it seems like the server owner can just randomly turn off the server and everyone's data is lost.
And I also just googled, and it seems like server owners can read private messages.
Yes, if the instance shuts down your data would be gone, but you can save a backup similar to what Twitter does.
Keep in mind that having your data online implies a cost that is not covered by advertising like Twitter does. You could always setup your own instance to be in control.