Talk:Mastodon (social network)

Tagging re. {{unreliable sources}}

@David Gerard: Thanks for notifying others interested in this article that some of the sources cited herein have been deemed {{unreliable sources}}.

Could you please identify which which of the 96 references for this article have been designated as "unreliable"?

Failure to do so, in my judgment, is a violation of Wikipedia guidelines in WP:DRIVEBY. I am therefore deleting your tag.

I hope you will restore it and be more informative about which sources cited herein are officially deemed "unreliable". Failure to do so, in my judgement, mitigates against the Wikipedia:Prime objective, to give "every single person on the planet ... free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

Are you familiar with the section on Articles on contentious issues in the Wikipedia article on Reliability of Wikipedia, and especially Feng Shi; Misha Teplitskiy; Eamon Duede; James A. Evans (4 March 2019). "The wisdom of polarized crowds" (PDF). Nature Human Behaviour. 3 (4): 329–336. arXiv:1712.06414. doi:10.1038/S41562-019-0541-6. ISSN 2397-3374. PMID 30971793. Wikidata Q47248083., cited therein? They found that "articles attracting more attention tend to have more balanced engagement ... [and] higher polarization is associated with higher quality." We cannot have that if references are deleted. I support citing "unreliable sources", while explaining, at least in a note, why they are considered unreliable and not to be trusted in that particular context -- or saying that they may be appropriate for a particular purpose but not others.

Thanks for your efforts to try to make Wikipedia better. DavidMCEddy (talk) 23:07, 19 February 2023 (UTC)

A ton of it is blog sources and primary sources, not independent third-party RSes - and it should be obvious to you that this is a problem. A tag is the least it warrants; blankly removing it in such an obvious case, as you did, seems inappropriate. While you can use lower-quality sources sometimes, it's not a good idea to have an article rely on them as heavily as this one does - David Gerard (talk) 10:17, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

@David Gerard: What may seem obvious to you may not be obvious to others. DavidMCEddy (talk) 13:29, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Then you may wish to review Wikipedia:Reliable sources and Wikipedia:Verifiability - David Gerard (talk) 15:32, 20 February 2023 (UTC)

Per this discussion, I've gone through tagging every questionable source in this article. There's a lot of primary sourced material, a lot of blog sources, and references that aren't about Mastodon at all. I'm only halfway through, but the huge swathes of the article that have zero RS support justify the tag at the top of the article warning about poor sourcing. It's written like a fan piece, not an encyclopedia article. We should give it a week before axing the fancruft - David Gerard (talk) 10:52, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

@David Gerard: You've tagged several citations as unreliable, including the following:

<ref>{{cite web|url=https://activitypub.rocks/news/mastodon-ap-and-new-cr.html|title=Mastodon launches their ActivityPub support, and a new CR!|website=ActivityPub.rocks|access-date=20 January 2019}}</ref>{{Unreliable source?|date=February 2023}}

Why?

The Wikipedia article on ActivityPub looks like it's a reputable source with zero indication that I can see that it's not reliable.

I have not checked the other sources you cite as unreliable, but I'm reverting all your recent {{Unreliable source?|date=February 2023}} as WP:DRIVEBY.

Please provide documentation to support your claims that ActivityPub and the other sources you tagged are unreliable. Thanks, DavidMCEddy (talk) 17:38, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

activitypub.rocks is a WP:SPS. Gerard's edits are clearly not drive-by given that you are literally discussing them here. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 17:46, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

@Maddy from Celeste and David Gerard: "activitypub.rocks" is the URL of ActivityPub. The fact that it has its own Wikipedia article suggests to me that it's more than WP:SPS.

Is that the only documentation you need to try to remove citations from this article? And after that, then you remove statements that are otherwise not in dispute? DavidMCEddy (talk) 18:58, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

what. There being a wikipedia article about something in no way affects whether its website is an SPS. ■ ∃ Madeline ⇔ ∃ Part of me ; 20:28, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

I urge User:DavidMCEddy once more to review WP:RS - David Gerard (talk) 21:35, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

They are not WP:RSes. They are blogs. How do they pass as WP:RSes? I really don't see it.

Also, I don't think you get to protest me not noting the bad sources, then remove it when I tag the bad sources. When you revert an action I took in direct response to you on a talk page as "driveby", this comes across as in bad faith. If I were to assume good faith, it would suggest you don't understand Wikipedia sourcing policies.

Please do not remove the tagging again. Instead, find better sources - or remove the unsourced material. Huge swathes of this article are just WP:FANCRUFT.

These sources are not independent third-party RSes. Mostly they're just some blog. A huge number are primary sources. Wikipedia is not a fan club for its article topics - David Gerard (talk) 21:42, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

I agree that blogs are generally uncitable. Policy does allow exceptions, though. There's WP:NEWSBLOG, and there's WP:BLOG, which says that "Self-published expert sources may be considered reliable when produced by an established subject-matter expert, whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable, independent publications", but only for unexceptional claims. The ActivityPub devs have had their federation standard published and sanctioned by the W3C after through review. I think that counts; they are experts on the fediverse.

We don't have a blanket ban on all primary and non-independent sources in any context. Mastodon's founder has also been interviewed and published by third-party sources on the subject of Mastodon, and he is thus categorized as expert but not independent, and a valid source for unexceptional, non-self-serving claims. "Mastodon is part of the Fediverse" is certainly an unWP:exceptional claim. However, it is one that can readily be cited to many sources other than the ActivityPub devs, and that would be preferable; improving adequate but suboptimal citations is a good thing and can be done by anyone. Things like version numbers and their release dates, and statements like "The database software is PostgreSQL", are harder to get third-party sources for. But they are unexceptional and unselfserving, and I'm willing to cite devs for them (as is standard on many other Wikipedia pages). Nor does Github seem likely to be wrong about the release dates and version numbers just because it is edited by the devs.

The consensus at WP:TECHCRUNCH suggests we should be wary of citing Techcrunch, so I'd also be happier with replacing that citation. Secjuice really does not look reliable and I don't think we should cite it.

I don't think it's a problem to cite both a primary and a non-primary source for a fact; providing different types of source for those interested in reading further is a well-accepted reason for using multiple citations. I'd favour removing all the "non-primary source needed" tags for facts that are already cited to both primary and non-primary source(s).

The "irrelevant citation" tags seem excessive; the Slate article about how quote functionality on Twitter enables hostile "dunking" seems like useful context for Mastodon's policy of not allowing quoting, as does a comparison between character limits on Mastodon and Twitter. HLHJ (talk) 01:29, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

It is, however, a literally irrelevant citation. Is it about Mastodon? No, it is not - it's being used to argue some other point in wikitext voice. That is, it's being used to support an editors' synthesis - David Gerard (talk) 00:13, 14 March 2023 (UTC)

So far nobody seems to be able to fix any of these with anything more RS than literal blog posts. Time to start clearing out some of the badly sourced content - David Gerard (talk) 23:35, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

Approach Content Moderation Section

The section on content moderation feels like it presents a narrow view of what Mastodon's approach to content moderation looks like. There is no Global policy on Content Moderation like there is for Twitter. Each instance sets its own policy. It feels like having a single instance's policy as the only example gives the wrong impression.(Lucas(CA2) (talk) 04:13, 26 February 2023 (UTC))

Sure, the article uses mastodon.social as an example, but I would not add too many examples. Pointing that content policy is decided by server admins is enough imho. – K4rolB (talk) 10:19, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Makes sense. Because Mastodon is decentralized, I think that using only a single example of how one instance sets policy is a bad way to illustrate the decentralized nature of policy on Mastodon. I think either two distinctive examples or no examples would be more clear than giving only one instance. Lucas(CA2) (talk) 19:16, 26 February 2023 (UTC)

Security Section

I added WP:ONESOURCE for the Security section because it is mainly a rewrite of one Ars Technica article. Maybe it could be expanded, even with recently published cites. P37307 (talk) 22:08, 13 May 2023 (UTC)

"Comparison to Twitter" section to rewrite

The whole section should be scrapped or greately expanded. As it stands it only gives a very narrowed view of the differences while at the same time gatekeeping in a minor section some of the main design goals of Mastodon, which I am adding on the summary. Cinemaandpolitics (talk) 21:30, 24 September 2023 (UTC)

I would propose that further expansion of "comparison to Twitter" should derive from reliable sources that back up the presence of comparisons of Twitter to Mastodon. I also added a rewrite tag. I'll try to find some additional reliable sources for Mastodon to back up the topic, however it is also quite a contentious topic to dive into Mastodon information due to being a subject of contention, specifically of controversies of Elon Musk's aquisition of Twitter. I could contribute to the talk page to provide some ideas, maybe some sandboxing in my userspace to draft up the Mastodon article. Qwertyxp2000 (talk | contribs) 02:48, 20 October 2023 (UTC)

Title needs to be changed to "Mastodon (software)"

The title of this article needs to be changed to "Mastodon (software)". Mastodon is not a social network. It is a piece of software people can used to run their own server as part of a decentralised social network commonly known as "the fediverse", made up of thousands of servers running Mastodon and other ActivityPub software.

It might be relevant in this article to mention that newbies to the fediverse often refer to the social network as "Mastodon", despite the facts mentioned above. But having "social network" in the article title is misleading. Danylstrype (talk) 02:51, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

This is technically true, but :

• It would not help navigation because, as you mention, people *think* of it as a social network.
• It is clearly explained in the article, so there is no problem with leading people astray.
• The nomenclature is not as clear as you suggest. The Fediverse article suggests that the Fediverse is an "is an ensemble of social networks" (of which Mastodon is one.) IMO, This usage seems pretty common.
• The majority of sources describe it as a "social media platform"
• It would go against previous consensus.

ApLundell (talk) 06:42, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

@ApLundell wouldn't renaming the page to Mastodon (social network platform) make the most sense then? RatherQueerDebator (talk) 09:14, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

(as an alternative solution, one could add the "This page is about software, don't confuse with the Fediverse" template) RatherQueerDebator (talk) 09:21, 23 June 2024 (UTC)

I think it is indeed a rather fine solution. I suggest replacing the current about template with (plus minus) the following:

This article is about an ActivityPub implementation. For other uses, see Mastodon (disambiguation). For the wider decentralized network, see Fediverse.

This doesn't strip Mastodon of its status as a standalone platform it evidently has, prevents the confusion, and shows the actual relationship between Mastodon and fedi - the former is a component of the latter. RatherQueerDebator (talk) 09:32, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

@ApLundell Then the fediverse article (which has been regularly mangled since I started it) also needs to be modified, because this too is a misleading description. The fediverse is a unified social network, made up of servers running compatible software packages (of which Mastodon is one). The fediverse is sometimes mis-described by newbies as "Mastodon", but once they learn they can use their Mastodon account to follow accounts on servers running FireFish, PixelFed, PeerTube etc they replace ""Mastodon" with "fediverse". My objection to the misnaming of this article stands. Danylstrype (talk) 21:56, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

I think this is approaching trying to right great wrongs. (Like "GNU/LINUX".)

Mastodon is almost invariably described by sources as a "network" or a "platform". Not entirely without justification.

If two "networks" or "platforms" overlap or connect, do we have to be reductionist and call them "software"?

I'm not sure that's 100% correct even if we chose to embrace pedantry over common-name rules, but it's certainly not the common convention.

* "Pixelfed is a free and open-source image sharing social network service.[3][4] "

* "PeerTube is a free and open-source, decentralized, ActivityPub federated video platform ..."

* "Diaspora (stylized as diaspora*) is a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network. ..."

* "Friendica (formerly Friendika, originally Mistpark) is a free and open-source software[5] distributed social network. It forms one part of the Fediverse, ..."

Beyond that, it's very deceptive to imply that the Fediverse is a single amorphous social network that just has different clients that connect to it. It is the platforms built on top of the Fediverse like Pixelfed, Peertube, and Mastodon, that give the fediverse meaning and structure.

Everything in tech is built on top of some other thing. I mean, ultimately, everything is built on top of IP, but it wouldn't be useful to insist that the WWW is "just software" and the only "network" is the Internet itself, although you could certainly look at it that way. ApLundell (talk) 16:39, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

@ApLundell the difference between GNU/Linux and Fedi/Mastodon is that the former is language purists, meanwhile the latter is a common mistake made by newbies. The former is controversial, the latter is simply a misunderstanding. RatherQueerDebator (talk) 20:49, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Stallman says the GNU/Linux debate is caused by ignorance, and I've certainly seen other people repeat the (false) assertion that people only prefer "Linux" because they don't understand the relationship between the kernel and the rest of the supporting software that makes up an operating system, so I think the comparison might be more apt than you think. But I don't insist on the comparison.

Anyway, I promise you: I do understand how the Fediverse works.

ApLundell (talk) 22:39, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Haven't said you don't - at least, didn't intend to. I'll clarify: what I meant by GNU/Linux being just language purists, is that there's no practical difference between Linux and GNU Linux to the end-user; But there's a difference between the Fediverse and Mastodon, as there there no mainstream non-GNU linux OSes, but there are mainstream non-Mastodon Fediverse platforms. RatherQueerDebator (talk) 09:21, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

@ApLundell"Beyond that, it's very deceptive to imply that the Fediverse is a single amorphous social network that just has different clients that connect to it."

I guess this depends what you mean by the phrase "social network". What you say is quite right where it's a medium, like the micro-posting medium of Mastodon, or the image-blogging feeds of PixelFed, or the video channels of PeerTube, or the forums of Lemmy/KBin. In this sense, the fediverse is made up of many subsidiary "social networks" and Mastodon is one.

But if Bob asks Alice "are you on this social network?", he's asking if he can find and interact with Alice there, even if they use different software. In this sense, everyone connecting to a server that speaks ActivityPub is part of one social network; commonly known as "the fediverse".

Can I suggest a compromise? Having two articles; one for Mastodon (software) and one for Mastodon (social network). The first one to cover the software, its history, the organisation that maintains it, and so on. The second to cover the informal usage of "Mastodon" for the social network made up of Mastodon servers, as a subset of the larger social network of AP servers, generally known as "the fediverse".

FWIW Using the term "fediverse" more expansively, to include social software using all federation protocols - older ones like XMPP, Matrix and IndieWeb and newer ones like ATProto (BlueSky) and Nostr - can only confuse people asking Bob's question above. Unless and until these are all bridged to each other and the AP network. But I acknowledge that some people are now using the term that way, for better or worse. Danylstrype (talk) 10:02, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

I'd say that's a fine solution. It also solves another problem, that Mastodon isn't actually ActivityPub-compliant, which creates a Massive ridge in the Fediverse - ActivityPub purists "vs" Mastodon and Threads. RatherQueerDebator (talk) 13:15, 24 July 2024 (UTC)

FWIW Eugen Rochko, the founder of Mastodon, has said quite clearly on Mastodon's own blog; "The social network that is Mastodon isn’t really Mastodon. It’s bigger. It’s any piece of software that implements ActivityPub." @ApLundell "It would not help navigation because, as you mention, people *think* of it as a social network." This could be solved very easily by renaming the page "Mastodon (software)" to make it accurate, and then redirecting "Mastodon (social network)" to it.Danylstrype (talk) 15:46, 24 August 2024 (UTC)