[HN Gopher] Mastodon.technology Shutdown
___________________________________________________________________
Mastodon.technology Shutdown
Author : freosam
Score : 511 points
Date : 2022-10-07 12:08 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ashfurrow.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (ashfurrow.com)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> A member of my family was very recently diagnosed with a
| terminal illness. I am doing everything I can to support them._
|
| I am sorry to hear that, but I can totally support them, and
| sincerely wish them the best of luck, dealing with a pretty awful
| situation.
| varispeed wrote:
| Huge respect. My friend is running a forum (I know madness today)
| and he is totally sick of it, but has no heart to close it nor
| trust someone will be able to take over given it is losing money
| (people - assuming "competition" - were posting adult content and
| then reporting to Google, so advertising eventually got turned
| off and other advert providers don't pay enough to keep the
| lights on).
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| > The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to
| administer.
|
| I always suspected this would be a massive problem with Mastodon.
| I contemplated running a server, but there's no way to know
| beforehand when you'll be running into a limit, like cost or
| time. Can you really build a social network on volunteers that
| invest their own money and time, with little reward?
| seydor wrote:
| This has been a massive problem with everything since PHP
| stopped being popular. Wordpress is easy even for a layperson
| to setup
| markstos wrote:
| Making friends is no small reward.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| The Fediverse isn't just Mastodon, and there are other
| microblogging platforms. Epicyon is designed to be a
| lightweight server: https://libreserver.org/epicyon/
|
| "Epicyon is a fediverse server suitable for self-hosting a
| small number of accounts on low power systems."
|
| In a testament to how the Fediverse really does Just Work, I
| stumbled across Bob, the developer, quite by accident from my
| Mastodon account and now follow him. His posts, from his
| Epicyon instance, appear just like anyone else on my home feed
| and we interact as if he lived on my home server. There are at
| least half a dozen people I interact with who aren't on
| Mastodon, either.
| EarlKing wrote:
| Yes, you can. However, you will also encounter nothing but
| grief because of jerks who want to screw it up. For a
| historical example of how this turns out, see FidoNet.
| berkes wrote:
| The tech also doesn't help.
|
| It's a "typical" Rails application: large, convoluted, lot's of
| moving parts, and services, and generally slow as molasses
| (solved by throwing more hardware at it). As experienced Rails
| dev(ops), I managed to run and help run an instance, but it's
| not something done on a friday afternoon, let alone scale up.
|
| What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services.
| I'm thinking about the difference between setting up a gitlab
| or a gitea. The first is Rails, needs ruby, gems, bundler,
| workers, database server, redis, mailserver and whatnot. And
| thats for manually installing on a server - no pipeline or
| anything to manage future changes. The second a single binary
| (pre compiled from a go codebase) everything statically linked
| (even sqlite is built in, with option to upgrade to postgres).
| Plop it on a server start it and go. For an intranet you might
| even skip putting a server/https in front, just run on exposed
| ports.
|
| We can dockerize all the ruby-stuff, but that might make it
| easier, it doesn't make it simpler, it really makes it more
| complex. And the performance-issues aren't solved.
|
| The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on your
| VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and simple
| servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a huge,
| slow and hairy beast.
| noirscape wrote:
| There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the
| biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can
| deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which
| takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that
| don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are
| the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise
| it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in terms
| of memory & cpu usage.
|
| DB backend is postgres. It's also by default far less cache
| heavy than Mastodon (which caches every external attachment,
| avatar and header locally, which causes a lot of issues since
| it's the main reason instances run out of disk space).
|
| Featurewise it actually surpasses Mastodon on almost
| everything except for not offering a tweetdeck-like UI.
|
| [1]: https://pleroma.social/
| davexunit wrote:
| Having used Mastodon for years now, my experience has been
| that when I receive an abusive/spam/troll message it's a
| safe bet that it was from a Pleroma instance. I know I'm
| lot alone in defaulting to distrusting users on Pleroma
| instances. Just something for new fediverse users to keep
| in mind.
| fkgncawhlp wrote:
| riffic wrote:
| > There are plenty of other choices.
|
| There's even WordPress, with a plugin.
|
| A lot of ~~people~~ _entities_ such as companies,
| organizations, etc have a WordPress site.
|
| edit: Pretend this site supports basic formatting in
| comments?
| berkes wrote:
| I know this exists. As does NextCloud. But what solution
| or use-case does it serve? I honestly cannot see it.
| Neither for WP nor for NC.
|
| ActivityPub is -aside from a protocol- something that is
| designed for social networking mostly. How does "adding a
| WP plugin" help? Why would I want to connect my blog or
| website to this fediverse? Is it just so people can get
| my blogposts in their timeline? Because that's the only
| use-case I can see, and that problem is easily solved
| with RSS (and a bot).
| knewter wrote:
| 1) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox is a frontend
| that works atop either mastodon, pleroma, or the rebased
| backend
|
| 2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased
| backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better
| maintained than pleroma
| noirscape wrote:
| I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer
| got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other
| maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a
| technical decision he forced through after it was deemed
| to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad
| practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger
| to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch
| of alternate endpoints to avoid having to use WebFinger
| for his personal frontend).
|
| He also had a history of more bad technical decisions to
| make Pleroma's backend cause problems with with the rest
| of the fediverse if the rest of the fediverse doesn't use
| his custom frontend and insulting developers who pushed
| back on that decision[2].
|
| Better maintenance seems like a really dubious claim when
| the lead maintainer is this unwilling to co-operate with
| the existence of other tooling and openly insults anyone
| disagreeing with his technical decisions. There's also a
| couple of PR reasons to not want to associate with him,
| but those are largely off-topic.
|
| The rest of the Pleroma project by contrast is fairly
| stable and it's developer team has been nothing but
| polite when it comes to handling support issues.
|
| [1]: https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/
|
| [2]: https://hacktivis.me/articles/Update%20on%20Pleroma%
| 20Mainta...
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| As a complete outsider who thrives on drama, everyone
| sucks here.
|
| Alex has shit opinions, 100%. But the back and forths in
| the Pleroma MRs linked are at the level of high school
| catty drama. And that applies to _everyone_ in there, on
| both sides. I feel like every single MR listed would have
| gone completely differently if the people involved
| treated the others as humans and actually worked towards
| building better software. At the end of the day, the
| commits were simple enough and could have been worked on
| had the people there actually wanted to do that. But
| instead they all just turned into name-calling high
| school kids. In short, everyone there needs to grow up.
|
| And while I agree that a one man shop in the form of
| Soapbox is likely not going to last, I wouldn't put my
| support in for Pleroma based on what I read either.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _There 's also a couple of PR reasons to not want to
| associate with him, but those are largely off-topic._
|
| They're more than PR reasons if you're one of his "wrong
| sorts"; personally, I'm not confident trusting (for
| practical reasons) or comfortable using (for emotional
| reasons) a piece of software whose MDfL doesn't think I
| should exist.
|
| It's probably off-topic for this discussion, but it's
| important to keep in mind if you're building a little
| community on the Fediverse: your choice of software ties
| your community's culture - at least partially - to the
| community of the developers. Your users will want to
| submit bug reports, and so on.
| noirscape wrote:
| I do agree with you completely there, it's just that HN
| doesn't tend to take well to pointing out that particular
| stripe of awfulness and that makes it a non-starter as a
| reason.
|
| He's definitely a case where I would broadly recommend
| marginalized groups to stay _far_ away from his tooling
| if they are planning on interacting with the development
| team in any way. The man is an demagogue (and openly
| proud of it) and an understated element to his bad
| behavior in co-operating with others is that it 's in
| part driven by that demagoguery (just reference the
| blogpost in the previous comment and how much of it is
| dedicated to crying about "cancel culture" where the
| reality is really just that he was an asshole to people
| and they showed him the door[1], very little about it had
| to do with his (IMO shitty) opinions.
|
| As far as software choices go; Fully agreed, although I
| always recommend people to not just go by public
| reputation and to always investigate before making a
| decision (in the case of Soapbox, you'll notice I linked
| both the developers resignation post and the post that
| caused relations with him and other maintainers to
| seriously start souring, so that one can make their own
| assessment).
|
| Pleroma for example got initially accused of being
| developed by neonazis due to an early instance modifying
| their source code to ignore incoming message privacy
| flags, everything was just set to be on the public
| timeline, all of the time. It's in reality completely
| wrong; in fact numerous developers to the software have
| been rather staunchly anti-fascist even since its very
| beginning, but that wasn't known by the public so the
| reputation of the project got tarred for years.
| Similarly, one admin blamed not removing hateful content
| on not having the tools, again, completely wrong, but
| then Pleroma got tarred with "not having basic moderation
| tools", even though it ironically has the must fine-
| grained moderation tools compared to anything else out
| there (you can literally write your own bit of code to
| automatically moderate and integrate it in the software
| itself if you wanted to).
|
| Finally when it comes to users submitting bugs: with the
| fediverse that usually doesn't actually directly go to
| the developer but instead lands at the feet of the
| instance maintainer, who makes the decision on whether or
| not to report it to the developers community. There's a
| certain sense of connection, but it's usually not as
| deeply tied as one would think.
|
| [1]: https://xkcd.com/1357/
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| Can we stop villifying people we disagree with?
|
| I've seen it so much, I'm more inclined to believe it
| absolutely didn't happen that way.
| afavour wrote:
| Is it vilifying when you provide sources of a person's
| negative behavior?
|
| "I'd recommend against this open source project because
| it has a solo author who has a track record of not
| playing well with each others" strikes me as statement of
| fact, not vilifying.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| About a month ago I had a mechanic call me pissed and
| tell me they didn't want to work with me anymore if I
| didn't trust them. I had been asking questions over text.
|
| That this happened is a statement of fact.
|
| I'm taking my old ford explorer over to him this weekend.
| Do you know why?
|
| Because I asked him what was wrong and explained the
| intent of the questions. We've had a working relationship
| for over 2 years, he was obviously having a bad day. No
| harm, no foul, humans are humans.
|
| And yet, his negative behavior is a statement of fact.
| Imagine if I then went around town telling everyone not
| to use this man because he "doesn't play well with
| others". I mean, it's only a statement of fact, right?
|
| Point of fact, the engine light in the truck came on
| earlier this week, I called him up and then drove it over
| so he could check codes (O2 sensor needs replacing). Had
| a conversation with him, where he told me his wife is
| living in Arizona to be a live-in baby sitter for their
| kids new baby, and he drives over there every other
| weekend (I knew his wife was in Arizona, but didn't know
| why).
|
| You're campaigning against a piece of software because
| you don't like the author. Not for technical reasons, but
| because the author "forced" (your words) stuff onto other
| people, then after these innocents reverted it back in
| defense of the whole of fediverse and he got mad and said
| mean stuff, so now we need to defend the reader (me, and
| everyone else) from his meanness.
|
| If you say so.
| afavour wrote:
| I feel like this is personal for you somehow and I don't
| know why. I'm not "campaigning" against anything, I
| posted one comment on a message board. Let's try to avoid
| bringing hysteria into the conversation.
|
| I'm glad you ended up having a working relationship with
| your mechanic but I don't think it's really relevant
| here. Your mechanic is not maintaining an open source
| project. He's fixing your car. Which is a great solo
| project.
|
| I think you're confused about my perspective so let me be
| clear: I'm not concerned with "defending" the reader from
| "meanness". I'm suggesting that investing in any project
| run by a single person is risky: more than likely if that
| person quits then the project is dead. That's strike one.
| The fact that the single author has a history of being
| combative with open source collaborators suggests it
| might be harder for the project to ever move beyond being
| a solo project. That's strike two.
|
| All of this is just common sense. I'm sorry if it rubs
| you the wrong way. If your mechanic decides to stop
| maintaining your car in the future there will be hundreds
| of other mechanics waiting to take the job (and,
| importantly, your money). A solo open source project
| depending on volunteers is a lot less likely to have
| that.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| stopped reading at the first sentence.
|
| Stop bringing your personal drama here please.
| afavour wrote:
| You do realise that you're the one being personally
| dramatic here, right? Especially with a comment like
| that.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| It's interesting how some people always assume it's a
| moral failing when others refuse to engage with their
| bullshit.
| afavour wrote:
| I'm starting to understand why you're personally invested
| in defending toxic online behaviour.
|
| I replied to your post, responding to the issues you
| raised in your original post. Engage with it or don't
| engage with it, that's up to you, but don't fill the
| forum with nonsense. Absent any actual interaction with
| the points I raised this will be my last reply in the
| thread.
| berkes wrote:
| I'm aware of Pleroma, but didn't mention it because I find
| that allthough it's easier than mastodon, it hardly is
| simpler. And being easier, IMO, isn't enough. The focus of
| pleroma is very much on the "lightweight" part. Which is
| good, bc that also desparately needs a solution. But we
| really need something that is all of it: easy, simple and
| lightweight. Not just easier and lightweight.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Epicyon might be worth a look:
| https://libreserver.org/epicyon/
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Would a pre-installed docker image be a solution to the setup
| issue? (Doesn't solve performance, of course.)
| berkes wrote:
| Not really. As I mentioned in my comment, it might make it
| easier, but not simpler.
|
| For one, maintenance, probably becomes harder even. And it
| won't be "a docker image", but a docker-network (-compose,
| k8s or such) because running requires not just a single
| service, but a webserver (https), runners (async workers),
| redis, postgresql, elasticsearch, file-storage and so on.
| You'd need some 4 to 8 images all interconnected to run it.
| And secondly, docker isn't omnipresent. I can't just copy a
| binary into /usr/bin , run it. I'll need docker,
| networking, docker-knowledge, logging, monitoring and so
| on.
|
| More so: if a docker is a solution to the setup of complex
| piece of server-software, than certainly docker is a
| solution to the setup of a simple piece of server-software.
| mariusor wrote:
| > What we really need in this landscape is dead simple
| services.
|
| I'm working on exactly that: a service that acts as an
| ActivityPub server (code[1], example[2], example application
| running on top of it[3]) for users in the form of a static
| binary. It supports multiple storage backends that can be
| selected individually or all together at build time and it
| can be extended to many more.
|
| [1] https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox
|
| [2] https://federated.id
|
| [3] https://littr.me
| jron wrote:
| Do you have plans to add comment functionality to
| littr.me/go-littr?
| rakoo wrote:
| This is exactly what we need. The current landscape of
| Fediverse is too young: every application involves both
| functionality, identity and community. So you don't really
| join a network, but you join a specific community using a
| specific medium. You can't join multiple communities (ie
| follow multiple instances): you have to create multiple
| accounts, you can't follow a full instance but only
| individual instances. You can't have microblogging and
| forums from the same account, because they are different
| applications, so they are different accounts. You can't mix
| functionalities beyond the most basic, because they are not
| thought out together.
|
| What we need is an AP store, and then applications build
| _on top of it_ , like your project does. But at this point
| I question whether matrix wouldn't be a better platform
| mariusor wrote:
| I feel like matrix solves a different problem, I believe
| that ActivityPub and Matrix can coexist. Honestly the
| very late game plan for the projects I'm working on is to
| be able gather under a single umbrella a suite of
| opensource applications to create a meta social network
| pod that can be easily launched in a similar way to
| Google apps on a custom domain (ActivityPub and Matrix
| for a starters). I think there could be enough money in
| that to gather venture interest, but sadly I'm very far
| from that moment.
| berkes wrote:
| I'm working on flockingbird.social, a "linkedin for the
| fediverse"[1].
|
| Aside from a job-search bot, I haven't written many
| software, and it looks like what you are working on might
| actually be a very solid foundation. It's a pity my go
| isn't that established (rust and ruby here) but certainly
| will consider this going forward. Huddling around common
| base libraries is also certainly something the fediverse
| needs, rather than re-building AP again in "language X".
|
| [1] The hardest part has proven to be the fact that
| "linkedin" is an entirely different product depending on
| who you ask. It solves entirely different solutions,
| depending on who you ask. And it has entirely different
| features, depending on who you ask. Turns out LinkedIn is
| quite hard to "copy", "port" or even define for the
| fediverse. Aside from that this makes it a giant task to
| do. Is it a place to find jobs? To recruit? To keep in
| touch with colleagues? To connect with other
| entrepeneurs? To spam lame motivational quotes? To pitch
| your book or a Rolodex-on-steroids? Its all of that and
| more.
| mariusor wrote:
| If you're working in rust I would recommend to have a
| look at the go-ap/processing[1] package, which provides a
| close representation of what the ActivityPub spec details
| about how to handle each Activity type. It's not complete
| at the moment, but it should be readable (I think) even
| for non Go developers and, in my experience it's not the
| vocabulary that trips people up.
|
| For your use case you probably need to define your own
| custom ActivityPub types and logic, but for the default
| ones, it's a good starting point (I hope). :)
|
| The go-ap org on github has a mailing list you can reach
| if you have questions or feedback.
|
| [1] https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-
| ap/processing#CreateActivit...
| rakoo wrote:
| Contrary to the way matrix is developed and sold today,
| the protocol allows for way way more than chat.
|
| There is talk at the moment about adding federation to
| got forges: let instances talk together, accounts cross
| post, etc. It's centered around instances and they have
| specific addons to interact. Matrix can make it work
| because it takes a radically orthogonal approach: rooms
| are front and center. Rooms can be joined by anyone
| anywhere. Rooms are replicated. The homeserver is a
| technical detail in service of the functional source of
| truth: the Room, an append-only log of arbitrary json.
| There is also a key-value store for arbitrary blobs to
| store binary stuff.
|
| In the context of forges, a repo can be a room: events
| for issues/replies, events for merge requests, events for
| CI/CD blobs for actual code storage and releases, ...
| Anyone can join and push events, with the correct rights
| of course, so you have branches included. Everything is
| replicated. No one cares what instance you are from.
|
| I seriously invite you to consider the semantically model
| of Matrix, it's pretty good.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Some clients allow you to pin the public timeline of
| another instance. As for spreading beyond your home
| server, tags are key. With the right client, or the
| Mastodon web UI in advanced mode you can pin a series of
| tags as its own timeline, which updates in real time, so
| you can follow discussions of interests, grouped
| together, with results from across the Fediverse.
| rakoo wrote:
| That sounds very nice and I must admit I haven't made a
| lot of research on this topic. But today the major
| servers are still sold as a building block for an
| "inside" community. You browse instance that are
| categorized by interests.
|
| Basically, the domain has much more significance than it
| really needs
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on
| your VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and
| simple servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a
| huge, slow and hairy beast.
|
| Even if you get the tech stack solved to an easily deployable
| package: The problem is you still need to invest immense
| amounts of time on moderation. Some of that responsibility is
| enforced legally (e.g. CSAM, warez, US COPPA, EU GDPR, German
| NetzDG), some of it socially (e.g. kicking Nazis, conspiracy
| spreaders or other forms of hate speech out), some of it by
| the federation system (e.g. kicking spammers out) and some of
| it you need to do to keep your community healthy (e.g. kick
| general trolls and creeps out). If your instance allows adult
| material, gambling or games, you'll need to moderate your
| instance as well in some jurisdictions. And you'll need
| someone always available to support police, court and secret
| service requests.
|
| Maintaining a service that hosts user-generated content is a
| thankless nightmare, and no matter what you do it is a huge
| liability. In the end, either you make your users pay for it
| in cash (subscription fees, patreon/gofundme/paypal
| donations), with their data (advertising) or you'll
| eventually burn out (such as the author of the blog entry).
|
| Oh, and add on top of all of that the _constant_ dealing with
| abuse: 4chan edgelords DDoS 'ing your instance "for the
| lulz", random skiddies constantly running exploit scans
| against your server (which _additionally_ means you have to
| have someone 24 /7 to upgrade software in the case of a
| 0-day), people reporting your server / IP to blocklists to
| get you booted off the net... then you have to take care of
| hardware maintenance itself, making backups, testing backups.
| It's a full time job essentially, requiring an awful lot of
| time, money and connections (e.g. lawyers).
| berkes wrote:
| You are right: managing a server is hard work. Thankless
| moderation mostly.
|
| But that is _even more_ reason to take away the additional
| work of keeping a large and convoluted rails-codebase up-
| to-date, running and performing.
|
| Also, part of why moderation is such a giant task, is that
| in the fediverse, servers (instances) tend to be big. Huge
| even. It's far easier to manage a server that hosts your
| ten friends, or the 30 members of your alumni-club, or the
| 42 members at the local hackerspace than a server with
| 2000+ random users.
|
| Another reason why lowering the barrier to the _technical
| part_ of managing a server must be lowered.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I run an instance and I really have none of these problems.
| Keeping open applications off solves a lot of them, you
| have to ask me for an invitation and I'm not going to give
| you one if I think you're going to be a problem.
|
| There's a Patreon for it that pays the server bills despite
| it only being a few hundred users. My users even say thanks
| for running the place now and then. Running a small node of
| The People's Glorious Social Network is a very different
| task than what you are outlining.
| afavour wrote:
| > Keeping open applications off solves a lot of them, you
| have to ask me for an invitation
|
| But that simply doesn't scale to the level of services
| like Twitter. You might argue, and I would agree with
| you, that maybe we'd be better off _without_ services
| that are too large to moderate in any meaningful way, but
| we are where we are. An invitation-only Mastodon network
| is not a viable alternative to Twitter.
| berkes wrote:
| > An invitation-only Mastodon network
|
| It's not the network that is invitation-only. Just some
| servers on that network that are. The network itself is
| entirely permission-less.
| arcatech wrote:
| But it's federated. You can have an invite only network
| that still federated with the rest of the network.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| > you have to ask me for an invitation and I'm not going
| to give you one if I think you're going to be a problem.
|
| How do you vet applicants? Depending on the theme of the
| site, this seems like it might range from easy
| (gardening, cooking, ...) to excruciating (politics,
| medical).
| berkes wrote:
| "My server, my rules" really is very easy.
|
| A lot often is just a simple matter of "if I don't like
| you, I won't give you access, or retrospectively kick you
| off". And the other side is that if you, as user don't
| like _that_ , there are thousands of other instances to
| choose from. And if _none_ are good enough for you, you
| can run your own.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| Yeah, but what point does a social network have if most
| of the instances are closed off to "unknowns" due to the
| abuse potential? The few that have open registration
| still have to do the workload I described => most of the
| users will flock to these centralized sites that
| _somehow_ have to deal with the effort required.
| egypturnash wrote:
| It's a place for me and my friends to talk, with
| connections to other places. A quiet little backwater.
| That's good enough for me to keep running it.
| noirscape wrote:
| It's mostly large if you make it large. I run a single-user
| Pleroma instance, my fediverse network is relatively small and
| for the most part I can keep my timeline clean purely by
| reaction.
|
| Even having around 20 users or so is still relatively
| manageable (used to run an open signup instance in the past).
| Basically as long as you don't exceed Dunbars Number[1],
| moderating a fedi instance is fairly painless.
|
| External moderation can generally be managed with snap
| decisions. If you use Pleroma (and you should, it's much more
| technically competent than Mastodon), you can manually disable
| external user accounts specifically from federating with your
| instance.
|
| Beyond that, most fediverse servers kinda make it really
| obvious whether or not you want to associate with them; they
| tend to be fairly open about what is and isn't allowed on their
| about pages so if you get a misbehaving user, you can usually
| see at a glance if the problem is instance-wide or just some
| random vandal.
|
| Your biggest burden really is local moderation, external
| moderation isn't a big deal at all.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
| tolciho wrote:
| "Why we live in hierarchies: a quantitative treatise"
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01744 might be a relevant read
| (Dunbar's Number does come up)
| TomMasz wrote:
| It's also a governance issue. Any site or service that's run by
| a single person, whether it's well-financed or not, is subject
| to burnout, illness, death, etc. Having a team and/or having a
| succession plan can help insulate from the impact these can
| cause. I submit as an example Metafilter. Matthowie ran it
| himself for a very long time but over time built a team that
| took over when he "retired". It's one of those things that must
| be put in place well before it's truly needed and doesn't lend
| itself to last-minute scrambles.
| phaer wrote:
| > Can you really build a social network on volunteers that
| invest their own money and time, with little reward?
|
| You can _at least_ use it for existing communities and "social
| networks": family, friends, geographical communities, hobby- or
| work-related ones. To provide them a somewhat self-administered
| space online to connect and share photos and other info. Thanks
| to federation this community can have its own "space" without
| being isolated from the rest of the internet. Open-ness can be
| somewhat gradual.
|
| There's lots of different of ways to organize funding and the
| ongoing technical work for such communities.
|
| I think it becomes harder to build sustainable instances the
| less socially connected the admins are to the average user.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| A major note in the Mastodon fediverse brought down by the fact
| that it's administered by one person who, despite the fact they
| are running a social network node, never built up the real world
| trust connections to find somebody they could share the toil of
| administration with or tap in when it was time for them to bow
| out because we are all mortal.
|
| The technological problems are not the hard problems in this
| space. The hard problems are social problems.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > The technological problems are not the hard problems in this
| space. The hard problems are social problems.
|
| This is something that perplexed me when Mastodon and Diaspora
| and others appeared: why would you want to recreate/mimic the
| toxicity of FB and Twitter ? The resharing, the upvotes, etc.
| If social networks all have the seeds of their defaults, why
| clone it ?
| wmf wrote:
| Coming up with "non-toxic" social media is extremely
| difficult and probably not something programmers can solve.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogging platforms aren't
| trying to recreate these abusive systems. They don't show
| boost/favourite counts, don't offer paid promotion or
| adverts, don't have the manipulation of the timelines or the
| other abusive dark patterns used to keep people hooked on the
| toxic pipes. I feel that being able to show appreciation for
| a post, or send it to the people who are interested in you,
| are both important ways to interact and can be implemented
| without the unhealthy byproducts of the corporate social
| media orgs.
| vidarh wrote:
| It does show boost/favourite counts once you open a toot,
| and just like on Twitter you can also click to see the list
| of people who have boosted/favourited
|
| The other parts are true, but the "manipulation of
| timelines" is just a question of time because it's _useful_
| if you follow lots of people. As long as it remains opt-in
| and a setting it 's a _good thing_. I 'm planning an
| ActivityPub implementation for myself and "manipulation of
| timelines" is one of the features I want to add the most
| for my own use.
|
| Point being that deviating from a strictly chronological
| timeline isn't the problem. Doing so in a non-transparent
| way the user has little control over is.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a
| new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they'd
| have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data
| from my local users, but from users they have interacted with.
|
| I'm not a Mastodon user, but this is haunting. Just like shady
| data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds" are
| running VPN nodes, subreddits etc, this architecture is
| practically designed for malicious actors. It wouldn't surprise
| me if it's already being used this way on other nodes.
|
| To be clear, in 2005 this would have been great, tech is moving
| fast so one has to remain humble when critizising architectural
| decisions. Nevertheless, today we can't trust private data in
| hands of benevolent (and often de-facto anonymous) volunteer
| actors, if we want scale and security in the decentralized (or
| even federated) world.
|
| We have had enormous progress in applied cryptography, both in
| social apps (Signal, Matrix) and defi (some successes, many
| failures to learn from). We should have the expectation for
| private data that the operator cannot read it. Doesn't mean
| that all data on a social app must be private, but DMs and
| invite only "groups" should be.
|
| Currently, the typical website with per-node password auth
| doesn't satisfy these constraints, since credential harvesting
| is trivial. It's very difficult to build E2EE web apps and even
| if, users have no habit of keeping secrets on-device. The
| client itself needs to be vetted and accessed securely. Perhaps
| Matrix is best positioned in this space.
|
| (Please correct me if I got any details wrong)
| smoldesu wrote:
| If this is a concern of yours, don't migrate your account.
| All instance admins play the role of Twitter CEO on Mastodon,
| which means (much like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook,
| Microsoft, Netflix, et. al) they can access all data you've
| trusted them with. The point of Mastodon is that it broke
| down these data silos, and give people more sane ownership
| models for social media. Your privacy concern is valid, but
| Mastodon doesn't advertise itself as a private protocol. A
| glorified microblogging platform doesn't really have a whole
| lot of data to leak besides maybe your DMs.
|
| > We should have the expectation for private data that the
| operator cannot read it
|
| That's called heterogenous encryption, and it's the
| technological equivalent of Mythril. End-to-end encryption
| doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data. In fact,
| pretty much _everyone_ has to, since raw encrypted TLS data
| can 't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account.
| These operators literally _need_ to read your data to operate
| on it. I genuinely don 't know how you would engineer a more
| secure architecture here.
|
| If you want to talk about architectures designed for
| malicious actors, you probably shouldn't start with
| distributed systems. Monolithic, profit-driven corporations
| like Twitter are much easier to tempt with salacious "data
| brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds""
| masukomi wrote:
| to build on that, a mastodon instance's "federated" feed is
| the feed of stuff that everyone on the server is receiving.
|
| Having publicly readable posts is core to the whole idea,
| just like Twitter.
|
| Note: there are some interesting forks like Hometown[1]
| that have interesting privacy variants. The big feature I'm
| envious of in Hometown is the ability to send a message
| _just_ to people on your server that will never leave it.
| BUT overall mastodon is 100% about publicly readable
| information (like Twitter). If someone isn't comfortable
| with that they shouldn't use Mastodon.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown
| mattdesl wrote:
| You might be misunderstanding E2EE. In double ratchet
| system, not even the operator or host can decrypt DMs.
|
| Fully homomorphic encryption is also possible to operate
| _on encrypted data_ albeit computationally impractical
| still for a couple years.
| [deleted]
| swyx wrote:
| yeah, idk if you could count this as a success when by his own
| admission there's so much user data essentially sited on one
| single point of failure/compromise.
| [deleted]
| andai wrote:
| Most surprising part of this for me is learning that Mastodon was
| created because they wanted a version of Twitter with _more_
| censorship.
|
| https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastod...
| bombcar wrote:
| Maybe things aren't meant to live forever; perhaps trying to make
| the ephemeral internet tied to long-lived permanent identities is
| the fundamental mistake.
| inglor wrote:
| Thank you for your volunteering and I hope your family member
| gets better Ash.
|
| I think it's unfortunate for us users but at least on an open
| source platform migrating to a new instance is possible. That
| said - this will be a hit to the community.
|
| It just shows how relying on infrastructure with a low bus factor
| is risky and something for future attempts to consider.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> relying on infrastructure with a low bus factor is risky_
|
| There are risks to every "bus factor," but I can totally get
| behind requiring a team of a certain size to be behind whatever
| infrastructure I rely on.
|
| Most of my dependencies have a bus factor of 1 (Yours Troolie),
| as I write packages for my own consumption.
|
| They are really, _really_ good modules, and I publish them as
| general-purpose modules, but don 't expect people (other than
| me) to really use them.
|
| I did write a fairly massive infrastructure project, and
| managed it, alone, for ten years, then it was taken over by a
| team, and "went viral," in a sense. The best thing I ever did
| for that project, was toss the keys to the new team, and walk
| away. It's in _very_ good shape, now.
| the-printer wrote:
| The fediverse would benefit from a massive migration to Honk.
| de6u99er wrote:
| Thanks for everything qnd all the best!
| [deleted]
| k__ wrote:
| What do you think is the main issue with Mastodon not really
| getting mainstream adoption?
|
| Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it?
|
| Not enough marketing?
|
| Bad UX?
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| IMHO, its decentralized nature just isn't compatible with most
| user, or the concept of social media.
|
| It works for certain demographics but not most.
| mariusor wrote:
| I bet the numbers of email users is larger than the
| individual ones for each social network. (a quick search says
| that the number of email accounts is estimated at ~4billion,
| and the most populous "social network", TikTok has an
| estimated at ~1billion users)
| Macha wrote:
| Network effects of twitter. Your friends are already on twitter
| if they still use this style of broadcast text based social
| media.
|
| Also recent privacy concerns and less recent issues with
| internet hostility means we're already past peak twitter, so
| mastodon is having to break into a declining market.
| mattl wrote:
| It's also less about my friends being on Twitter and more
| about the people who aren't my friends being on Twitter
| too...
| k__ wrote:
| Yes, so probably a marketing thing.
| mattl wrote:
| I see few communities outside of open source and adjacent
| being interested in Mastodon because it's hard to find
| the people there.
|
| Even a technology related post will get much bigger
| reception on Twitter.
| k__ wrote:
| Hm, in the past many social networks came and go, so I think
| there should be more to it than "network effects".
| rvz wrote:
| All of the above, plus little to no-one actually bothered to
| use it daily, with not enough users to even talk to and
| compared to Twitter, Mastodon has an extremely limited network
| effect.
|
| This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why
| they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.
| shadowfacts wrote:
| Lots of people use it every day: myself, the people I follow,
| a lot of people who follow me, countless others I don't
| interact with. Yes, the network has few users compared to
| twitter, but it's a far cry from "little to no-one".
| tomphoolery wrote:
| 1. as mentioned earlier, network effects of twitter
|
| 2. you can just sign up for twitter, you don't need to pick an
| open instance run by some stranger.
|
| 3. deploying a rails app isn't trivial, mastodon being written
| in rails and dependent on multiple DBs makes it harder to
| install and thus harder for people to run their own server.
|
| As we continue to improve computing power and efficiency, I
| think the idea of using a federated social network so you can
| "own your data" is going to become less and less attractive. If
| you take this concept to its logical extreme, eventually
| everyone will run their own social networking server, and we'll
| be interconnected with each other through some kind of DHT
| magic. After all, the fediverse is still "someone else's
| computer", it's just that "someone else" in this case is some
| guy and not a for-profit company. It doesn't really solve the
| problem.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people
| who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their
| users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the
| one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In
| doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move.
|
| Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The
| Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst
| it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the
| admin(s) and move on.
|
| You think this shows a disadvantage compared to twitter? Let's
| talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will. How will your
| argument hold up when f*c*book finishes dying? We'll find out
| soon enough. Or how about when a telecoms/media conglomerate buys
| out flickr or tumblr and puts a stake through their heart? Oh,
| that already happened.
|
| This is a bittersweet testament to exactly how the Internet
| should be built: on the foundations of openness, community and
| decentralisation.
| riffic wrote:
| > Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will.
|
| Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is _not immune_ from
| being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites,
| wikipedia):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
|
| The Fediverse (or Federated Social Web as it was previously
| referred to in 2007[0] or so when it was first envisioned) will
| never close. Single installations may, but the network as a
| whole can not.
|
| [0]
| https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_So...
| ryanisnan wrote:
| Wouldn't the answer for most people to "What happens when
| Twitter shuts down?" be, "Well I'll just move to the next
| social media site".
|
| I don't necessarily hold that opinion, but I get the
| impression most folks I know do.
| riffic wrote:
| people will move to the next social media site (or jump to
| another medium if it's good enough) even before Twitter
| shuts down.
|
| This happens all the time and there are parallels with
| other format / medium shifts (Gutenberg invents movable
| type, newspapers supplanted by news reels at the cinema ->
| people buy radio receivers -> broadcast television -> cable
| news -> whatever we have today with our always-on internet
| connections and services.
|
| My main point here is that audiences are fluid, we can
| respect their intelligence, and they go where the content
| is.
| krapp wrote:
| >Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from
| being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites,
| wikipedia):
|
| It is if people who've decided it's "de facto infrastructure"
| get their way and the government nationalizes and regulates
| it. Then we're all stuck with it forever.
| riffic wrote:
| nothing's stopping your local city council, library, or
| fire department from shoe-horning the ActivityPub protocol
| into their existing website (like WordPress or Drupal or
| whatever CMS they use) and immediately turning their site
| into their own Twitter service.
|
| I'd like to see RSS come back in a big way, but replace RSS
| with ActivityPub and instead of nationalizing shitty
| centralized commercial services, adopt the protocols that
| allow for distributed and federated social activities.
| marcinzm wrote:
| Sure, but commercial entities generally shut down when
| there's too few users to justify the costs. But then you're
| not comparing the value of current Twitter shutting down but
| an empty wasteland Twitter shutting down. An empty wasteland
| Fediverse also wouldn't be of much use to the vast majority
| of people.
| numpad0 wrote:
| By same logic, UUCP never died.
| cmeacham98 wrote:
| Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon,
| but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time
| soon is laughable.
|
| I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or
| Mastodon will live longer.
| rakoo wrote:
| Mastodon will probably die first because it's just a software
| but that's not a problem: ActivityPub, the protocol, and the
| Fediverse, the network, will most certainly outlast Twitter.
| Unless Twitter chooses to get compatible with the Fediverse.
|
| A protocol can't die. People are still using IRC, XMPP, good
| ol' email, decades after they were created. They are still
| useful, they still work, so there is no reason for them to
| "die"
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| Hey even gopher has 333 unique servers according to a
| recent census. But for all practical purposes it's pretty
| much dead.
| danuker wrote:
| > for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead.
|
| It has a very small community. That is very different
| from being dead - in fact, that community is probably
| much more passionate about what makes it specific than a
| large community.
|
| For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more
| prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.
| otikik wrote:
| Google Reader T_T
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any
| time soon is laughable._
|
| He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.
| [deleted]
| burntwater wrote:
| > How will your argument hold up when f _c_ book finishes
| dying? _We 'll find out soon enough._
|
| Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| "soon enough" could be a decade relative to the
| assumption that they'll be around forever.
| lovich wrote:
| If you're going to stretch definitions like that "anytime
| soon" can go as far. It was a reasonable paraphrase
| Chris2048 wrote:
| If by "stretch" you mean "consider the context", then no,
| it's an unreasoned paraphrase.
| lovich wrote:
| Given the context interpreted the original post as
| implying that the end of those services was in short term
| timeframe. And apparently so did the poster im defending.
|
| That may not have been what the original poster intended
| but if that's the case then they should use less
| ambiguous language.
| stormbrew wrote:
| In theory people are supposed to use the most charitable
| interpretation on HN. Interpreting the post as talking
| about a timeline of months or a couple of years, as it
| seems some replies have done,is definitely not that.
|
| That said, network effect declines can happen much faster
| than people think, and can be hard to see in the numbers
| social networks usually put out. History is short on this
| kind of service, so precedent doesn't mean a lot.
|
| I wouldn't put money on Facebook being around and
| anything like it is now in 10 years. It's barely anything
| like what it was ten years ago, and it's clearly not
| meta's priority anymore.
|
| Twitter is tricky because Elon resuming his bid creates a
| wide range of possibilities, some that include him
| cannibalizing it out of spite. He's a wildcard here, as
| evidenced by him putting in the bid in the first place as
| something that appears to have been little more than
| corporate trolling. But if he takes it seriously or turns
| around and sells it to someone who will it could benefit
| from a coherent vision (even if it's one I would find
| very unappealing).
|
| Source: I worked for a regionally dominant social network
| in the early days and watched it evaporate nearly over
| night.
| jasode wrote:
| _> He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part._
|
| I don't think it was a deliberate misquote of gp to
| manipulate readers. Instead, the _" anytime soon"_ was
| responding to gp's exact statement of : _" We'll find out
| soon enough."_
| makapuf wrote:
| I understood this as soon enough after they close.
| pohl wrote:
| ...which is certainly before the heat death of the
| universe.
| akkartik wrote:
| That's an extremely loose bound. 60 years would have the
| same error bars.
|
| https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-
| will...
| j_k_eter wrote:
| I find the idea that X won't / can't happen on a 3 month
| timeline, in this political climate, silly. Is there such a
| thing as stability bias? Because folks had best recalibrate
| their expectations for rate of change, starting a few months
| ago. I won't be taking any bets on Facebook, but the thing
| I'm replying to sounds like 6-months ago thinking.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Depends if X is a tool/cause/symptom of the political
| climate you are talking about.
|
| Because Twitter is, so I think I side with the guy that
| said it's silly to think it'll shut down soon.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| I mean if you're saying human existence can't be guaranteed
| 3 months into the future, then that's one thing, but what
| does Facebook and Twitter's stability have to do with the
| current political climate?
|
| And if you _are_ saying the former, then Twitter and
| Facebook's longetivity should be the least of your
| concerns.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Funny you say that, the chance of nuclear war is the
| highest since the Cuban missile crisis.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| Which is why I said what I said. If the "political
| climate" were to affect the longetivity of Facebook,
| Twitter et al, then their longetivity is the least of our
| concerns because it would imply something _much_ more
| disastrous has happened.
|
| I personally couldn't care less that there's no Facebook
| around when I'm living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape
| due to the "political climate".
| barkingcat wrote:
| Once the twitter sale is completed, the new owner of twitter
| can chose whatever they want to do with it, including
| shutting it down - which in this milleu would be something
| that the buyer of twitter will consider doing just for LOL's.
|
| imagine the trolling potential of a rolling outage of twitter
| or ooops "new owner" deleted the database as a joke. Or
| replace all twitter profiles with sayings from Doge.
|
| before you say "this person can't possibly do this" ... think
| again.
| phpisthebest wrote:
| The salt mine and troll would be much greater to bring back
| trump and merge with truth social putting twitter on the
| fediverse
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| That might be slightly over exaggerated. Musk may have
| other equity investors and certainly has other debt
| investors (assuming they come through, but then the whole
| deal hinges on it). So he still has some level of fiduciary
| responsibility. And a need to cover his Tesla stock backed
| loans with generated cash flow. Though how much impact that
| would have is definitely debatable, it probably isn't zero.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| Curious though, mastadadon owners can potentially be like
| that too, no? And stakes are too low to do mischief with
| mastadon vs. Twitter.
| gnull wrote:
| Who are mastodon owners?
| barkingcat wrote:
| the individual owners/operators of each mastodon
| instance.
|
| there is the mastodon project, but you can fork the code
| and make your own community if you want more control over
| your own codebase when it comes to your own mastodon
| instance
| warkdarrior wrote:
| The owners of the Mastodon instances one connects to.
| 3371 wrote:
| Yes, but why did you ask? I suppose that's exactly one of
| the reasons why fediverse users want to choose who they
| trust, isn't it?
| barkingcat wrote:
| of course! but my reply was to answer "claiming Twitter
| or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is
| laughable."
|
| which is ... truly laughable if you like doge?
| Taek wrote:
| In some sense of the word they are already shut down.
| Moderation is very heavy on both and certain topics just
| can't become widely shared. For example, a recent thread by a
| sex worker had something like 8/30 tweets censored off the
| platform (despite none of the content being graphic,
| offensive, or illegal).
|
| So sure, Twitter will run for a long time. But it doesn't
| have very strong guarantees to its users about how it will
| treat them or what content will be allowed.
| EarlKing wrote:
| Neither does any point on the Fediverse. As long as
| operators think they can run their site any way they want
| instead of obeying a common protocol then they're federated
| in name only. To put it another way: If I can never trust
| that my email will make it to someone on gmail due to the
| opaqueness of their spam filters, with no way to be
| whitelisted by a recipient, then email has been thoroughly
| decommoditized and centralized... and so too a 'federated'
| system where operators set arbitrary rules that result in
| whatever server they don't like being unreachable.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > so too a 'federated' system where operators set
| arbitrary rules that result in whatever server they don't
| like being unreachable.
|
| Nah. If you can pick your king, he's not really a king.
| The intended recipient of your communication decided to
| join a server that censors your type of message.
|
| The problem is when the federation becomes a trust, and
| members collude. Like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, for
| example. The more division, the more federation, the
| harder it is to collude.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few
| large organisations. So long as we take measures to
| ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will
| always be a viable solution to complaints about an
| instance's moderation.
|
| I disagree with moderation decisions made by many
| instances, but if they made _no_ moderation decisions, I
| would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I 'm glad of
| it, even if it's a pain sometimes.
| EarlKing wrote:
| "Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of
| servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain
| obscene conduct.
|
| I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they
| see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely
| by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow
| never seems to be an option.
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| > _I 'm also amazed that giving users control over what
| they see isn't an option._
|
| so... you never actually used Mastodon? Its users do have
| the ability to filter content based on keywords, accounts
| or domains.
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| > "Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality
| of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just
| plain obscene conduct.
|
| You've said this, but didn't bother to give a reason.
| Can't you go to church even when the plurality of people
| tolerate porn?
| afavour wrote:
| > In some sense of the word they are already shut down.
|
| C'mon. Let's call a spade as spade: you wanted to complain
| about moderation and you shoehorned it into conversation.
| In no way does it make Twitter "shut down".
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| f*c*book has been floundering for some years now and is
| lurching from trying to follow one trend to the next, pouring
| money into each attempt and everything twitter seems to do
| causes another exodus. They'll be brought out and then
| hollowed out, or attempt a major pivot which will be fatal
| for their global relevance. This is without the spectre of
| data protection laws offering us more and more protection
| from the abuse of these sorts of platforms, having themselves
| broken up by monopolies, their revenue stream being cut off
| wholesale by the likes of Apple, investors and big customers
| finally realising they're paying for bots and I'm sure
| several other bear traps just waiting for them to stumble
| into.
| philippejara wrote:
| why are you censoring facebook?
| freedomben wrote:
| I was wondering that too, and I think my brain may have
| figured it out. on a quick glance at the way it's
| written, my brain read "fuckbook" rather than "facebook"
| since f*c*book aligns with both. If that's right, it's
| kind of silly IMHO
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| It's both silly and a sign of my absolute contempt for
| them ;-)
| gnull wrote:
| I wouldn't claim Twitter will shut down soon, but one could
| argue that mastodon is more robust because it's divirsified.
|
| There's no single person on earth who can shut down Mastodon,
| so Mastodon dies only if this decision is made massively by
| many people (or if development stops, but then still nothing
| will stop the server I run on raspberry pi in my bedroom).
| Twitter otoh can be shut down by one person for a whole
| multitude of reasons without any concern for the opinion of
| users.
| barkingcat wrote:
| try opening any myspace/google+/orkut/and so on links and you
| can see this in action.
| ccn0p wrote:
| OP didn't say anything about timing. Everything comes to an
| end. The point is that the timing in one case is decided by
| the users, the other by shareholders.
| dangus wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
| EvilMole wrote:
| I don't think he was saying either Facebook or Twitter is
| going to close _soon_. Heck, MySpace is still around. But
| sooner or later, centralised systems either shut down or
| become something completely different: think about Tumblr as
| a good example of that.
| EarlKing wrote:
| I'll just butt in at this point to note that 'federated'
| systems are more or less FidoNet and Usenet warmed over,
| neither of which managed to overtake commercial systems, and
| in the latter case was rendered useless by spam... much like
| Mastodon and friends which are rendered useless by racism and
| porn.
|
| Speaking of which... there's supposed to be a Mastodon Server
| Covenant(tm)(c)(pat. pending) in regards to such matters, but
| the https://joinmastodon.org/covenant where it's supposed to
| be documented is 404. Looks like it was quietly removed
| sometime after August of this year.
|
| In any case I'll make a prediction: Mastodon will remain a
| haven for people too racist and/or porn-obsessed for even
| Twitter and Reddit to tolerate and adoption will be hampered
| accordingly.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| > much like Mastodon and friends which are rendered useless
| by racism and porn.
|
| I think you and I were on very different servers, and
| considering I've perused dozens, you must have gotten a
| really raw deal.
| EarlKing wrote:
| You don't have to look very hard to find screaming
| racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to
| hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that
| sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular
| biases and kinks.
|
| I note for the record that this is precisely the sort of
| thing that doomed Voat. They got invaded by racists who
| decamped there after being given the boot from Reddit and
| promptly began spamming every sub with their obnoxious
| behavior which chased off everyone else. They shouldn't
| be surprised that they have a reputation for being a
| haven for people too toxic even for Twitter/Reddit.
| delusional wrote:
| Voat was specifically marketed towards the "free speech
| above all else" crowd, which will always attract people
| on the fringes since they are the ones with opinions too
| distasteful for the rest of society.
|
| Many instances of mastodon on the other hand are happily
| engaged in real meaningful moderation. The owner is
| expected to moderate what type of content is allowed on
| their instance, with the federated aspect ensuring the
| "free speech".
|
| That's not to say mastodon is without issues. The issues
| of voat just can't be transferred wholesale.
| EarlKing wrote:
| I don't recall Voat ever being specifically marketed as
| such, although it was certainly characterized as such in
| the press. It was literally just Atko's .NET knockoff of
| Reddit.
| neltnerb wrote:
| The only "marketing" a mastodon server does is the
| description on the main website though, what matters is
| who joins the server. It seems that people who would join
| a server that was characterized in the press as "free
| speech above all else" love racism and porn. It's the
| people on the server, not whatever the administrator
| claims to want.
|
| I'm on mastodon.scholar and the most risque thing anyone
| has posted was a closeup of Neptune's uncensored moons. I
| don't disbelieve you, mastodon is part of Earth and
| unfortunately that means there are racists there, but I
| don't think your experience is typical.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| You also dont have to look very hard for large
| communities that absolutely will not tolerate racists.
|
| The difference between the fediverse and most other
| online places for manyyyyyy fediverse users who use it
| day to day is that if a bunch of racists show up and
| start making things shitty then somebody (mods) will
| ACTUALLY do something about it whereas every other online
| platform just didnt really care or defend the vulnerable.
|
| Are there large communities of racists on isolated parts
| of the fediverse? Sure. It is an open source software,
| even Trump's shitstick social network tried to steal and
| use mastodon.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| > You don't have to look very hard to find screaming
| racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to
| hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that
| sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular
| biases and kinks.
|
| Of course not. It's on the Internet. I don't have a
| problem with furries, people with bias or kinks. What if
| I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make
| public comment?
|
| None of the instances I've used tolerate the harmful
| examples such as racists or lolicons, that you've
| incorrectly lumped together with perfectly cromulent
| lifestyles, and thanks to that I've barely seen any. And
| on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the
| entire instance and move on. This happens maybe five
| times a year, if that.
| EarlKing wrote:
| > What if I'm one of those people, should I not be
| allowed to make public comment?
|
| If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're
| using gains a reputation accordingly.
|
| > And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or
| the entire instance and move on.
|
| Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can
| ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a
| federation. You have, at best, a gathering of barely-
| interoperable fiefdoms. You can either have a federation
| of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't
| like -- you cannot have both.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| > You can either have a federation of commoditized
| servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you
| cannot have both.
|
| Why not? A person is only banned from one instance, they
| are free to choose another and federate across any
| instances they haven't been banned from. That sure sounds
| like having both federation and the ability to ban.
|
| These are not public utilities. A person or organization
| doesn't _have_ to support someone with opposing views to
| them. And that's ok. And that doesn't break federation,
| except to specific instances for specific people.
| [deleted]
| vidarh wrote:
| The big lesson from places like USENET is the opposite:
|
| Functioning federation _depends entirely_ on good tools
| for users to filter and ban people and content.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| You're trying to redefine "federation" and failing...
|
| It's a protocol for independent systems to automatically
| exchange some information.
|
| It's not a distributed system of interchangeable
| instances.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| >racism and porn.
|
| That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the
| planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.
| remram wrote:
| And let's not act like Twitter isn't full of those _to
| this day_...
| thrown_22 wrote:
| They're getting rid of the porn ... so people are
| leaving.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Now that Reddit is very respectable, we're supposed to
| pretend that it wasn't started as normie 4chan, even
| ripping off naming subsections like naked directories,
| just like every imageboard. A normie 4chan that got lucky
| by existing when digg decided to commit suicide.
| paganel wrote:
| Not sure about the intentions of the reddit founders, to
| be honest, but at the beginning there were no subsections
| and the like. When they did show up they were implemented
| as sub-domains, for example http://programming.reddit.com
| . I can't exactly remember how much that lasted, but it
| was for more than a couple of months (I'd say for at
| least half a year) before the directory-thing was
| implemented.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| The reddit founders bailed it within a year.
|
| Then Aaron Swartz took over and made it successful until
| 2013.
|
| After he was killed by the US govt the original founders
| came back and have been running it into the ground ever
| since.
| thrown_22 wrote:
| Where is your myspace page?
| petesergeant wrote:
| That's true of Facebook, but I can see Twitter receiving a
| fatal blow if the Musk acquisition goes through.
| vinaypai wrote:
| There's a lot to dislike about Elon Musk (mostly related to
| his lack of filter) but he has founded multiple successful
| companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars each. It's
| possible he'll somehow make twitter worse than it is and
| starts hemorrhaging users, but if I had to choose I'd bet
| on Twitter ending up in a better place than it is now.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Mr Musk is unambiguously both brilliant and a complete
| ass, and I think people who underestimate him or lionise
| him are both wrong.
|
| That said, I think he is buying Twitter for the lulz /
| weird libertarian reasons, rather than making a real
| business out of it, and I have serious concerns it will
| injure what is currently a public utility absolutely
| beyond repair.
| guelo wrote:
| He's buying it for the same reason all other billionaires
| buy media outlets, to be able to push their narrative
| onto the public consciousness. Social media isn't what
| users post, it's which user posts the algorithm decides
| to show. For someone with a conglomerate with many
| interests and huge ambition, owning popular media can be
| very profitable even if the media outlet itself isn't.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Rumors are that he plans to WeChatify twitter under X.com,
| so there's more of a chance that twitter gets put under
| something larger and becomes neighbors with Square.
| numpad0 wrote:
| and then what? Twitter is one of those platform in which
| overeducated, depressed, insane and innocently malicious
| kids goes to deploy engineered narratives and absolutely
| unprofitably destructively dominate over people of all
| ages and identities. Normies has no place in it, and if
| anyone is going to change that, the platform just bleeds
| and eventually dies. It's a 4.4chan-Lite. What comes of
| normalizing and integrating it into the society, even to
| Musk himself in short term?
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I think you misstate the complete twitter sphere, but
| even still if you have a public platform _used by all
| ages and identities_ , to which you add a commerce and
| payments platform and improved messaging, I think you
| would have something. The hardest thing to get is
| critical mass and Twitter has it. Musk believes twitter
| has been mismanaged, and may be squandering it, but
| that's why he's buying it.
| assetlabel wrote:
| I think Twitter will become better when everybody who left
| for Gab, Mastodon, Gettr, Truth social, etc, all come back.
| Conversations that are more representative of what the
| public actually thinks (no matter how much you might hate
| what they say) are more useful than echo chambers.
|
| I can't predict what Musk will do, but I'm under the
| distinct impression he's trying to allow free speech for
| everybody, get rid of bots, improve the tech (allow editing
| a tweet), and potentially hold people to account better by
| not allowing (or deranking) anonymous accounts. There's
| also leaked chat with Jack Dorsey about making an open
| interoperable protocol. Twitter would not die if it opened
| it's protocol and federated. As a public company that would
| destroy the ability to profit, but as a private company he
| can do that.
|
| I have a lot of faith in Elon based on past results. He
| already solved the problem of people who don't believe in
| climate change - he got them to buy electric cars because
| they are sexy. Brilliant man.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time
| soon is laughable.
|
| where is soon?
|
| And also, do you have a crystal ball to predict the future?
| isaacremuant wrote:
| You don't know when they will simply decide not to give you
| access to certain data.
|
| Look at email providers who suddenly decided "If you don't
| use it for X months, you're inactive and I'm deleting
| everything".
|
| It's not about the service existing but people being able to
| extract and use what they've put in, in 10/20 years.
| ElevenLathe wrote:
| These services may not "shut down" but they might change (or
| have already changed) so much that many would not have signed
| up knowing what they know now. This is kind of a danger of an
| open protocol too (for example, IRC users who signed up in
| 1998 to talk about Britney Spears gossip are probably not
| well-served by most current IRC networks), but not to the
| same extent.
| qznc wrote:
| Let's use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still
| not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG
| scene laments its demise.
|
| Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rp
| g/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
| tfrutuoso wrote:
| Google isn't really a good example, they love killing off
| services on a whim. Meta closing down Facebook would be
| much more... dramatic, shall we say.
| riffic wrote:
| Google's the best example to be honest.
| monocasa wrote:
| MySpace and AIM might be better examples then.
| lapcat wrote:
| MySpace today still has more active users than Mastodon.
| monocasa wrote:
| MySpace deleted all content prior to 2016, making it
| effectively a new network from the Myspace people
| normally talk about.
| [deleted]
| deelowe wrote:
| Or geocities.
| edgyquant wrote:
| No, there are no good examples is the point because we've
| never been here before
| nix23 wrote:
| Oh the youngsters....
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| Not even. Still a fraction of the userbase and daily
| activity we are talking about with today's social sites.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Google+ is a great example of the point that once a
| community's platform gets shut down, it's often tough to
| find another place to meet, and some people don't survive
| the transition.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| Right. So what happened to UseNet-News? Would that not be
| an ideal federated platform with a standard protocol and
| everything?
| vidarh wrote:
| Maintaining federation of USENET was a massive effort. I
| used to run an NNTP server, and spent way too much time
| dealing with ensuring we had redundant feeds and kept up
| with the volume. And on top of that handling spam. It
| worked well for what it was _at the time_ , but it was
| nowhere near an ideal federated platform.
| vgel wrote:
| What has Mastodon improved on this process, though? It
| seems the same issues are in place -- difficult to
| administer technically (this post) and hard to deal with
| spam (have heard before, don't have a link on hand
| unfortunately). This is a genuine question -- I wasn't
| around for USENET so maybe this is a "quantity of
| difference becomes quality of difference" issue where the
| degree of effort for maintaining it was just way harder
| than it is now.
| ZWoz wrote:
| Usenet is still here. Smaller, than used to be, but still
| here. Probably average English speaking person even don't
| understand, how big it is: there are healthy German
| speaking userbase, lot of people from Italy, even some
| Finnish groups have life in them.
| louky wrote:
| I'm back on Usenet, and hey my 5 digit uid on /. Still
| works! Meta-moderation!
| politician wrote:
| The main problem here is that contact information is
| lost. If there's one problem that distributed blockchain
| technology would be the better solution for, it's a
| durable collection of self-managed identifiers and groups
| of identifiers.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > Let's use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and
| still not all wounds have healed yet
|
| Despite (and in contrast to) the absolute massive marketing
| effort that Google put into Google+ right from launch, it
| never achieved mainstream success as anything other than an
| OAuth login tool. That doesn't mean nobody used it, but it
| was always niche.
|
| It's not a proper comparison for Twitter or Facebook, which
| grew organically and are both mainstream successes as
| social networks.
| eitland wrote:
| Sad sad story.
|
| It was the best social network that existed, and before it
| shut down it had so gotten so much right that I think no
| others have matched anywhere near the complete feature
| sets.
| ipaddr wrote:
| I remember Google+ and thought it was bad for the average
| person overall and I'm glad they shut it down for
| unrelated reasons.
|
| Having the biggest social network sucking up personal
| data to feed the ad network is the reality we are in.
| Having Google with a larger collection of personal data
| linking everything to a large social network would have
| made things worse. Google+ forced real names which made
| facebook force real names. Google appstore and
| preinstalled apps you cannot remove force location data.
| Google obtaining your social graph leads down a dark
| path.
| eitland wrote:
| Very good points.
|
| Still, technically, Google+ was far ahead of their
| competition.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Let's use Google+ as an example._
|
| Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and
| have been at or near the top of their categories for over a
| decade.
|
| Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after
| it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.
| ByThyGrace wrote:
| TIL about .compact on reddit threads. Thanks!
| giantrobot wrote:
| Wait until you learn about .json and .rss on Reddit
| threads! IIRC they used to work for subreddits as well
| but I have not tested either in...forever.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| A few of the Reddit RSS features I've found / documented:
|
| <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/red
| dit_...>
| tanepiper wrote:
| I'm still pissed at Google for deleting everything related
| to a Google+ profile. I had a second gaming profile linked
| to my main one which also has a YouTube linked to it.
|
| Their email about shuttering went into a tab in Gmail and
| didn't spot it, a suddenly my entire YouTube channel was
| deleted.
|
| Hundreds of hours of work of crafting early videos of
| Elite: Dangerous and the beauty of its simulated galaxy
| just gone.
|
| Luckily backed up on a NAS but I've never put them back up.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Didn't G+ shut down primarily because nobody was using it
| (failed to compete against other options)?
| Kye wrote:
| They shut it down because PR disasters were adding up due
| to security breaches from not having enough people paying
| attention to it.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Google's stated reason for shutting down Google+ was on
| account of security issues.
|
| That said, Google's stated communications regarding
| Google+ had and have been questionable from the start.
| I'd had my own part in this in addressing the true size
| of the active community on the site, which was far below
| the 3--4 billion listed profiles and many hundreds of
| millions of active users touted. In practice, probably
| closer to 4--6 million true frequently actives within 30
| days or so (itself not unsubstantial), and perhaps 100
| million who'd been active at some point.
|
| <https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq>
|
| But I'd take that stated reason with a large dose of
| salt.
| loceng wrote:
| "... the indie RPG scene laments its demise."
|
| Where did they move?
| noasaservice wrote:
| Sometimes when communities die or are killed, they don't
| come back. Nobody knows where to go to re-convene.
| remram wrote:
| This is different because mastodon.technology will keep
| operating until December 1st. This leaves them plenty of
| time to organize a move by discussing it on the platform
| like they always have.
|
| They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the
| built-in migration system) or find a new network, but
| they are not getting killed with no way to find each
| other afterwards.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| One of the huge problems with on-platform discussions is
| ... that the discussion itself dies with the platform,
| and any decisions or announcements disappear with it.
|
| At the same time, based on my own personal experience,
| _it is absolutely impossible_ to get people to move to
| another platform or service _even for the purpose of
| discussing future plans_.
|
| My exceedingly strong advice is to have _multiple_ points
| of presence defined _as a matter of course_ , one of
| which should be a simple email list (which provides
| persistent contact information), _regardless_ of any
| awareness of an impending platform shutdown.
| voakbasda wrote:
| This should part of a plan for online organizational
| continuity. Any community that uses big tech's services
| should probably have one.
| pwinnski wrote:
| Mostly discord as far as I can see. There's no single
| place, though.
| insightcheck wrote:
| This is just a guess, but probably various subreddits and
| Discord servers. It's probably not the same because the
| platforms are very different, but people will find new
| platforms even if the conversation changes due to
| different forum/messaging UI designs.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| "and Discord servers"
|
| _vomits in my mouth a bit_
| insightcheck wrote:
| Could be more different. In less tech-focused
| communities, the migration that follows a forum closure
| goes to Facebook groups instead of subreddits, and Slack
| channels instead of Discord.
| rco8786 wrote:
| > Google+ as an example
|
| It's probably a better example of a service that never got
| off the ground.
|
| Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their
| current cash positions alone.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I suspect otherwise.
|
| One of the challenges of a social network, especially in
| a declining phase, is that there is far less commercial
| value being generated at the same time that various sorts
| of costs, including attacks on the network in both
| technical and social/economic senses increase. High-value
| members abandon the network, and those who remain are
| either stuck (say, because of institutional circumstances
| elsewhere), or are actively seeking to exploit other
| members.
|
| This means that Trust & Safety costs are constantly
| increasing at the same time that recruiting talent to
| serve that role becomes increasingly difficult.
|
| What the true cost curve looks like isn't clear, but
| basing your statement on a _constant_ cost based on
| _present_ experience is ... probably flawed.
|
| This is especially true at Facebook's scale.
| monkin wrote:
| And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let's
| hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users
| discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in
| matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers
| adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will
| not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an
| "free" world bubble isn't helping in any project adoption.
|
| So I do not see any advantage in federated system. It's cool as
| technology and all, but completely unprepared for huge traffic
| or real life scenarios.
|
| PS. Please do not say anything about "anyone can start his own
| instance". No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can't start
| his own instance.
| guerrilla wrote:
| > Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How
| do you approach this?
|
| The same people who pay for everything right now will pay for
| it: us. Some instances will have patreon, others will be
| voluntary donation, others will use some craptocurrency,
| others will have contractual subscriptions, some will have
| ads... And whatever models are best will win out. Quit with
| the FUD. Just sit, back, relax and watch it happen.
| oogali wrote:
| Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were
| run?
|
| Resources donated by an organization in the form of a server
| linked into a larger network, a committee that vetted new
| server applications to the network, volunteer administrators
| for the network and the individual servers, coordinated
| regional and global upgrades. And as network users increased,
| reforming under a hub and spoke models to improve scale and
| capacity.
|
| And when a single IRC server went away after some time
| operating for its various reasons, the network kept going.
|
| Could the average IRC user start/host their own instance
| *and* link it to the larger network? No. But they didn't need
| to.
| Griffinsauce wrote:
| Besides the other comments, was this anywhere near the same
| scale?
| lapcat wrote:
| > Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were
| run?
|
| I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.
| importgravity wrote:
| And yet a large number of channels and a large number of
| communities migrated seamlessly to Libera and survived.
| lapcat wrote:
| > migrated seamlessly
|
| I disagree with that characterization.
|
| > and survived
|
| Survival is not the issue. Mastodon will survive. Tumblr
| survives. Even MySpace survives. But major disruptions
| tend to lose users.
|
| (And yes it's true that the potential Twitter acquisition
| is a potential major disruption. But it's not going to be
| shut down after a $44 billion investment.)
| verdverm wrote:
| It's not $44B that twitter will have available and can
| spend. Most (all?) will go to current investors to buy
| their stocks at a set price, which is where the $44B
| comes from
|
| It's probably more about how much the new owners will
| want to drop into it and how long before it moves to
| x.com (?) and becomes an everything app
| lapcat wrote:
| > It's not $44B that twitter will have available and can
| spend. Most (all?) will go to current investors to buy
| their stocks at a set price, which is where the $44B
| comes from
|
| Why did you feel the need to mention this 100% obvious
| fact?
|
| Of course I meant that the new owners wouldn't shut down
| something they just spent $44 billion on, thereby
| throwing their investment in the trash, not that Twitter
| would magically get a $44 billion operating cash
| infusion.
| verdverm wrote:
| You called it an investment, it is not an investment, it
| is an acquisition.
|
| It was not 100% obvious what you were implying, obviously
| lapcat wrote:
| > You called it an investment, it is not an investment,
| it is an acquisition.
|
| Okthanksbye.
|
| > It was not 100% obvious what you were implying,
| obviously
|
| "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation
| of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize."
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| verdverm wrote:
| In Comments
|
| Be kind. Don't be snarky.
|
| ---
|
| I see you've edited it now to be more clear
| importgravity wrote:
| The staffers setup the new servers and did all the heavy-
| lifting.
|
| As a user, I only had to point my client from Freenode to
| Libera (exactly one line change in my client config), run
| /msg nickserv register to register myself, run /msg
| chanserv register to register the channels I op-ed, and
| it was all done.
|
| Total time spent was less than 30 minutes. The next few
| days, others did the same and the community started
| trickling in to the channels in the new servers. Seems
| seamless enough to me. I doubt such an easy migration is
| possible if Twitter disappears suddenly.
| efdee wrote:
| And yet userbase got decimated for most channels when
| moving from Freenode to Libera. Just because it was only
| 30 minutes (for you or for anyone) doesn't mean people
| will go through the effort.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| anecodote only, but #ardour lost precisely zero users
| when moving from freenode to libera. just because people
| on channels you joined weren't willing to go through "the
| effort" doesn't mean that other people feel that way.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| The active userbase was not affected very much. (Note
| that some channels moved to OFTC, not Libera.) The lurker
| userbase was more than decimated - I think it about
| _halved_ - but they were barely part of the communities,
| and there might not even have been anyone sitting behind
| the IRC clients.
| monkin wrote:
| As a daily IRC user I can say this: IRC never was reliable.
| Constant attacks, splits, nick squatting or other crap ware
| pain in the ass. That's why it never was adopted as a
| mainstream communication platform, and at its peak it had
| maybe 400k+ users. Now most of that are bots and stale
| sessions.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| As a daily IRC user: IRC was never _reliable_ , but it
| persists still. A distributed system is easier to hurt
| but far harder to destroy.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| in the last 20 years I have had more attacks on my email
| account and $whatever_current_social_network account then
| I had on my irc account. Things like nickserv and ip
| cloaks (which have been part of nearly all networks I
| used to connect to and those I connect to) do the job
| just fine. Is it easy to flood down a server, sure is,
| but if there's more then 1 hub on the network, things
| will settle pretty quickly normally.
|
| In my opinion, the main reason why it was never adopted
| as a mainstream platform, is because it was never picked
| up by a big corp that saw a way to earn money off of it.
| importgravity wrote:
| I am a daily IRC user and I think you are exaggerating
| the problems. I can count on my one hand the number of
| times I have seen an attack on my nick or the channels I
| hang out in, in the last 15 years. Those attacks pass
| without much disruption (sometimes requiring staffer
| intervention). Nick squatting is solved by Nickserv these
| days. Splits do happen occasionally but they resolve on
| their own automatically without much disruption.
|
| It is ok if it never gets adopted as mainstream
| communication. But for the target audience (like
| opensource support communities being the target audience
| of Libera), it works quite well.
| zo1 wrote:
| I don't think we can just assume that "reliable" is a
| globally agreed property to judge alternatives. That
| property is something that came about and on some level
| spoiled users. Because for commercial social network
| providers any downtime meant a loss of users, eyeballs,
| and most importantly money.
| stevenally wrote:
| Mastodon.Social has a Patreon page. Quite a few supporters.
| Obviously Wikipedia, NPR etc are a model.
| Kye wrote:
| Simple: It collapses and the millions move on to the next
| one, leaving the collapsed server to catch up and come back
| online. Like a scared but surviving turtle. Most servers are
| crowdfunded. Even the project's instances get funding through
| Patreon.
|
| The official instance finding site seems to be good about
| spreading the load out every time Twitter burps. You have to
| meet certain reliability requirements to even be listed.
| ineptech wrote:
| > PS. Please do not say anything about "anyone can start his
| own instance". No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can't
| start his own instance.
|
| This isn't a law of the universe, it's just software people
| haven't written yet. Installing new client-side apps was
| hard, until it wasn't. "Anyone can start their own instance"
| will be easy once someone writes the software to make it so.
| (Presumably a cloud provider like AWS, since that's who
| stands to profit from lots of people wanting to run server-
| side apps)
| Kye wrote:
| Anyone can just pay $6/month to the good folks at
| masto.host to manage one for them. It's enough for them and
| possibly a few friends. I don't know if there are any other
| managed Mastodon companies, but this one has been around
| for years and has a good reputation. Their managed
| instances also meet the joinmastodon.org listing
| requirements by default.
| elikoga wrote:
| > Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds
|
| what, why? The load is hardly that high.
| madmoose wrote:
| When the Musk takeover was first announced it was
| practically impossible to register on many of the most
| popular Mastodon instances.
|
| An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS
| on Mastodon.
| naavis wrote:
| For reference, based on quick Googling, Twitter publishes
| around 10 000 tweets per second on average.
| 83457 wrote:
| On average I guess that makes sense. The peaks must be
| ridiculously high though.
| woevdbz wrote:
| I'd assume it's not so much the peaks that are a
| challenge - most of these 10k tweets/second aren't
| critical to serve to anyone fast, and that scales
| horizontally- it's the hot spots, that one tweet thread
| in the spotlight right now that everybody wants to read
| and jump on - that doesn't scale by just adding more
| servers
| ndriscoll wrote:
| i.e. my laptop could handle the write load. A retired
| nerd with a real server they put in a data center for
| bandwidth could easily run that level of traffic on 2022
| hardware.
|
| For reference my work laptop (8 logical cores, so 4+HT?
| 32GB RAM) can handle 100k rows/second sustained inserts
| into postgres 14 with some batch jobs I'm working on. You
| can buffer http requests into batches and easily handle
| way more than 10k/s on a server while still providing
| synchronous semantics and reasonable latency to the
| client (e.g. flush batches every 10-100 ms).
|
| I doubt Mastodon is designed for that kind of
| scalability, but most techies could probably afford to
| run Twitter as a hobby if they knew what they're doing
| and they weren't trying to do all the analytics and
| advertising stuff to monetize it/just wanted to provide
| the service.
| brazzy wrote:
| Yeah, you have not the faintest clue what you're talking
| about.
| rakoo wrote:
| Who pays for Twitter ?
|
| Who said anything about the Fediverse _having_ to be free ?
|
| There is absolutely no doubt that should Twitter die, if no
| single actor can emerge quickly enough, for-profit actors
| will emerge and they will have all good reasons to be
| compatible with something that already exists. There will be
| mega large instances paid by siphoning data and with ads,
| there will be large instances paid by users/funds/donations,
| there will be small, community instances. Maybe HN will have
| its own instance; how much do you pay for HN today ?
| KoftaBob wrote:
| This is why I view the "federated" form of decentralization
| to be more of an intermediate stop-gap between fully
| centralized and fully decentralized in the form of true P2P.
|
| For a decentralized social network to be viable/sustainable
| (especially on the scale of something like Twitter), it has
| to be truly P2P, not federated on volunteer-run servers paid
| for through donations. That volunteer-run federated model is
| really only sustainable for smaller niche communities, not a
| global social network.
|
| As of right now, the closest framework I can think of to
| handle something like this is a social network built on
| OrbitDB: https://github.com/orbitdb
| toss1 wrote:
| Is there anything to prevent a person/group from setting up a
| Mastadon instance with a charge to cover hosting, admin, &
| support costs (something like businesses charging for service
| on Open Source software support)? This could both make it
| more stable and sustainable and be a barrier to bots/trolls.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Musk suggested that for Twitter and responses were not
| positive at all.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Nope - Mastodon supports invite-only which can aid in this
| sort of set-up; I'm sure other platforms do as well. And if
| one runs a close-knit community (which takes more than
| expertise and infrastructure), donations or something like
| a Patreon scheme can work.
| SyndicWill wrote:
| Our pay-what-you-can cooperative Mastodon instance at
| social.coop, running strong for over 5 years, is currently
| debating what to do with our 10,000EUR budget surplus.
|
| The idea that social media costs more to operate than people
| would be willing to pay is false. It's propaganda from the
| people who profit from keeping you trapped in their closed
| networks to monetize your attention.
| eliaspro wrote:
| Admins of existing instances can configure user limits, close
| registration, etc., so new user will move to other instances
| or create demand for commercial instances.
| andreyk wrote:
| I think the problem is exactly that the average consumer
| can't start their own instance. What if there was a front-end
| service that made creating a fediverse instance as easy as
| creating a discord or Slack, and handled all the messy
| technical stuff with setting up an instance for the average
| user, while at the same time allowing said user to have full
| control of the cloud files? The front end would be incredibly
| light weight (just API calls, no data storage), so even if it
| shut down, as long as it is open source someone else could
| run their own instance of it on a different URL and the user
| could keep admin of their instance through that.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Pay for what? It's not about making money.
|
| > By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close
| anytime)?
|
| "That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this
| example. Partly, yes. But that sort of total exodus would
| mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code
| to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier
| to run your own instance. Who's to say it couldn't be run
| just like an email client with the right ideas and effort?
| It's such an extreme example that I'm not even sure it's
| useful to discuss.
|
| What traffic is it prepared for? It would be interesting for
| you to provide the numbers and the evidence which backs this
| up.
|
| As for real life scenarios...there are upwards of a million
| people using it right now. I've made friends, networked
| professionally and found several homes there. I am literally
| a real life scenario and so are the people behind most of the
| posts there.
|
| And today you are right about "anyone can start their own
| instance", but it's a darn sight easier than running your own
| twitter.com, and it'll get easier every year.
| monkin wrote:
| > Pay for what? It's not about making money.
|
| For servers that run Mastodon.
|
| > But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of
| additional people contributing ideas and code to the
| Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run
| your own instance.
|
| Most users aren't interested in contributing anything to
| the platform. Social media platforms popularity lays in
| simplicity. No one wants to run anything, just use service
| without any hassle.
|
| > there are upwards of a million people using it right now.
|
| Compare that to 200m+ users of Twitter sending 500m+
| messages daily. I bet Mastdon can handle this without a
| sweat.
| concordDance wrote:
| > For servers that run Mastodon.
|
| Running a server that can cope with thousands of users
| would probably cost just a few dollars a month. Donations
| would be more than sufficient.
| PKop wrote:
| Time to maintain it ain't free
| rvz wrote:
| This right here. He's right you know. Everyone knows that
| Mastodon can't handle this amount of users and after 6
| years, it's enough to see that by itself it has failed,
| (unless you count Truth Social as a great example of a
| Mastodon usage that has more users than Mastodon itself
| in less than a year)
|
| It is not early days anymore and no non-technical user is
| interested in hosting their own servers for chatting with
| another person. They don't care about decentralization as
| even if they tried they will recentralize to the main
| Mastodon instance.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| And hell, even tech users aren't inclined to sign up for
| a sysadmin role for free with absolutely nothing in
| return except users berating you whenever there's
| problems. Which there will be at some point in time.
| Source: I ran chat services for friends. I no longer run
| chat services for friends.
| [deleted]
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > "That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this
| example. Partly, yes.
|
| Twitter pays people money to keep their service running, so
| there's that incentive.
|
| > As for real life scenarios...there are upwards of a
| million people using it right now. I've made friends,
| networked professionally and found several homes there. I
| am literally a real life scenario and so are the people
| behind most of the posts there.
|
| Twitter is, say, 300m MAUs. That would mean the volunteer
| Mastodon infra would have to increase 300x (assuming
| scaling is linear, and the Mastodon community hits Mastodon
| as hard as Twitter users hit Twitter) to cope with similar
| traffic numbers.
| imhoguy wrote:
| I am not participant but I have seen some invite only
| fediverse instances. Can't there be paid instances too, even
| pay by (please don't hate me here) watching ads ? Does
| actually anyone need to cater to millions of users?
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Absolutely. In Mastodon it's a pretty simply setting IIRC
| and I expect it's commonplace across other microblogging
| platforms that use ActivityPub. I certainly wouldn't be
| against the principle of joining an instance that was paid
| for.
|
| The whole "millions of users" fallacy is the result of
| people not being able to grasp what federation is about.
| The network can easily accommodate millions of users.
| Individual instances don't need to be able to.
| derekzhouzhen wrote:
| As a counter example, email is a federated system too. I
| don't think a federated network should, or can for that
| matter, mimic the user friendliness of a closed system; so
| there won't be massive exodus of users from Twitter to the
| federverse, no matter how screwed Twitter became.
| rvz wrote:
| Yes, hosting is a cost and it is not 'free', hence the
| frequent downtime with Mastodon instances, even when they had
| traffic during Elon's takeover of Twitter many of then could
| not even handle the new users.
|
| Also, these users don't even know which instance to go to,
| since there is little to no-one to talk on there. If there
| are 'hundreds of thousands' of users then that means they
| have just recentralized on Mastodon.social, the "main"
| instance, defeating the point of it all.
|
| > PS. Please do not say anything about "anyone can start his
| own instance". No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can't
| start his own instance.
|
| This is why Mastodon has failed in the first place after
| almost 6 years with this system.
| arcatech wrote:
| Weren't you complaining about mastodon having "no users" in
| the last big discussion about it here? Do you have some
| kind of personal issue with the protocol?
|
| There are plenty of people using it. It has not "failed".
| rvz wrote:
| > Weren't you complaining about mastodon having "no
| users" in the last big discussion about it here?
|
| Yes, I said: _' Little to no users'_. After looking at it
| for a couple of years, it is not the typical twitter user
| that is self hosting their own Mastodon instance and just
| the same tech-folks that are doing that (unreliably) and
| sitting on Mastodon. The level of social interaction on
| Mastodon is so low and limited, that they still use their
| Twitter accounts more than their Mastodon accounts.
|
| So yes, it is not early days anymore and we have given it
| enough time and it has already failed.
| MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote:
| What exactly has Mastadon failed to do?
| riffic wrote:
| This user's been on HN for a while repeating this ad
| nauseam.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=rvz+mastodon+failure+site
| :ht...
|
| I wouldn't engage.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I'm following so many accounts that if I don't sign in
| for three or four days I can barely keep up with my home
| feed. Almost all of it is interesting, funny, insightful
| or simply chill discussion. They almost exclusively use
| the Fediverse, none of them use the Fedi as a second-
| class citizen. Your insistence that something that is
| alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof
| that you have failed to bother with it because of your
| preconceptions.
| dumpsterlid wrote:
| Exactly. I use mastodon daily, I follow tons of people
| that do as well. Mastodon doesnt need to be massive or
| fulfill whatever growth expectations armchair tech
| entrepeneurs expect of social media platforms here. It
| just has to be reasonably easy to maintain and actually
| play an important role in people's lives and it is
| absolutely doing that.
|
| Also, I put content warnings when I blab on about some
| tech thing because not everyone is a techy there. I am
| friends with lots of people there who will roll their
| eyes and walk away if you start blowing their timeline up
| with that kind of topic and you arent conscientious. It
| isn't just techies all hanging out with no reason to be
| there other then the tech novelty of it, it is a lot of
| peoples' home.
| rvz wrote:
| > Your insistence that something that is alive, growing
| and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have
| failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions.
|
| Having 90% of _registered_ accounts inactive with only
| 10% of them actively using the platform isn 't exactly
| 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy' especially when they
| occasionally run back to Twitter since they know little
| social engagement goes on Mastodon. 10 is closer to 0,
| than 90 and usage is still declining; Hence _" Little to
| no one"_.
|
| But we both know it is not just that. Not only they can't
| help using Twitter more, they _won 't_ move to Mastodon
| for the exact same reasons as I said and Twitter's
| network effect, hence why little to no-one is using
| Mastodon. The same tech-folks like (Mastodon.technology)
| are the ones 'self-hosting' these instances and not the
| regular users, since they don't care enough to even use
| it.
|
| Not even the one operating Mastodon.technology could
| handle it. Might as well recentralize back to
| Mastodon.social just to save itself from the very low
| levels of social interaction since Mastodon has already
| repeated the same problems as GNU Social once again.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| > Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only
| 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly
| 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy'
|
| That's not at all true. Account activity follows the
| Pareto principle. It's not at all unusual for any online
| service to have a large number of inactive users. Perhaps
| it's different for Twitter, but considering I've probably
| signed up for it three times and use it approximately
| never, I'm skeptical.
| Kye wrote:
| Six years of steady growth is a Silicon Valley failure. It
| is not a failure by any reasonable measure. I predicted
| back in the early days that Mastodon would grow slowly and
| organically as more people figured it out and helped people
| in their circles come over. It's slow and steady, but I was
| right. This is how things grew before anything less than a
| double-digit billion sale to one of the big tech companies
| was seen as a failure.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I look at all of the interests and discussions and
| shitposts that are on my home and local feeds, watch the
| interactions between mutuals and people argue, learn,
| laugh and join in shared hobbies and simply cannot fathom
| how this can be "failed". All this and if I turned off my
| anti-virus I wouldn't see any adverts and am never
| subjected to abusive interests or dark patterns. How is
| this failure? It's what I want from the Internet. It's
| real, actual people.
| ekianjo wrote:
| > Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds.
|
| Of course not. Mastodon instances can be capped in the first
| place, and anybody with a rudimentary server management
| knowledge can start their own instances on a cheap server.
| Mastodon has current hundreds of instances, let's not pretend
| it can't go to thousands if the user base increases.
| walls wrote:
| It sounds like the only actual advantage is 'you get to keep
| the same account'?
|
| That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care
| about.
| lovich wrote:
| > f*c*book
|
| Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of
| using M$ Instead of Microsoft?
|
| Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling
| mdrzn wrote:
| "What will you do when MySpace shuts down?"
|
| We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of
| _some_ users having to move multiple times because the server
| they are no closed.
| bitL wrote:
| Well, I shut down my FB page 6 years ago and didn't move
| anywhere else. The "social network" need died in me already.
| lapcat wrote:
| Also worth noting that MySpace is still running and though
| far below peak usage still has millions of monthly visitors,
| likely more than Mastodon.
| registeredcorn wrote:
| Just as a small nitpick, there is still a community on Flickr.
| There are certain elements that Photographers get out of Flickr
| that we don't get from Instagram, or other platforms. This
| isn't to say that the service is as big or powerful as it once
| was, but it has done an adequate, if not satisfactory job, at
| meeting the needs of its base.
| toastal wrote:
| Very true in comparison to Instagram. Flickr doesn't strip
| your metadata and color profiles. They allow uploading actual
| rectangle photos instead of square or square-ish. They don't
| compress the hell out of the images. They store an original
| of the upload (great for an archiving failure). There's also
| more community-building tools even if they're no where near
| the vibrancy of a decade ago (though the unlimited storage is
| probably what led to the decline as many folks just dumped
| everything on it).
|
| The biggest beef is everything that comes with it needing to
| be for-profit and how you can't control the whims of the
| product owner.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I did go for the jugular a bit :-)
|
| I know a fair few people who were really big Flickr fans back
| in the day and they lament at how the service has changed,
| and how its soul was diminished, because of the interests of
| those who now control it. You're right that it is still a
| going concern.
| krolden wrote:
| Doesn't at&t already own flkckr by way of yahoo?
| generalpf wrote:
| SmugMug bought Flickr quite some time ago.
|
| https://www.smugmug.com/together/
| philosopher1234 wrote:
| Why not consider twitter, Facebook, tumblr as decentralized
| instances of social media? Why build decentralization into the
| tech instead of having decentralization through multiple
| companies existing? A real community is being destroyed here,
| even though other similar ones exist
| woah wrote:
| This article is replete with examples of the weaknesses of a
| federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit.
|
| > This made me realize how little joy I've been getting from
| being an admin. How I've come to resent the work I have
| volunteered to do. I've donated countless hours to running the
| instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and
| I've always put the instance above my own needs. But I can't
| put the instance above the needs of my family.
|
| > Why Not Transfer to a New Admin?
|
| > Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a
| new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they'd
| have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data
| from my local users, but from users they have interacted with.
|
| The ideal inherent in federated systems- "people will use
| servers run by their anarchist commune's sysadmin" breaks down
| in real life. Nobody actually has a personal anarchist sysadmin
| to run their mastodon instance for them. In absence of this,
| the servers in federated systems are run by strangers on the
| internet who foolishly volunteer themselves for a huge amount
| of unpaid work, and who you just have to hope are going to be
| responsible with user's data.
|
| This is why the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of the blockchain
| world has been so much more successful. The first thing they
| figured out was how to reward people running the servers, and
| how to make it so you don't have to trust them. It's a viable,
| expanding system, and with improvements to scalability and
| privacy, it will handle decentralized social media as well.
| sedatk wrote:
| All in all, it doesn't mean much. Mastodon makes the domain
| part of your ID, so moving to another server isn't different
| than, say, moving to Twitter. Even if it's possible to move
| your existing content, it doesn't have significant value on an
| ephemeral timeline. You might as well save your backups and
| keep going.
|
| Mastodon might be able to force your followers to follow your
| new account, but AFAIK it doesn't do that either for reasons I
| don't know. That would've been cool.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Mastodon does inform your followers when your account
| moves[0], but unfortunately doesn't allow you to
| automatically migrate your existing posts over to your new
| account.[1]
|
| [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8003
|
| [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
| corobo wrote:
| Can you copy your toots across yet? Last I heard you can only
| migrate profile which seems a bit.. well I can do that by hand
| in 10 minutes
|
| E: called them tweets
| dane-pgp wrote:
| You are correct. There is currently an open issue[0]
| requesting support for migrating posts, that was opened in
| 2019 and unsurprisingly has some comments from today pointing
| out how useful such a feature would be.
|
| [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Myspace still hasn't shut down
| [deleted]
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events,
| you shouldn't avoid doing something just because there could be
| a small chance of death(not walking out side to avoid a meteor
| strike).
|
| Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network
| size, reach and content.
| sam1r wrote:
| >> Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan
| events.
|
| Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example
| hypothetical "black swan" events?
| csa wrote:
| Not op, but...:
|
| - Multiple C-suite executives and board members get caught
| up in a Jeffrey Epstein level underage sex and sex
| trafficking ordeal. They resist when busted, and it becomes
| a spectacle. The evidence is just messy enough and the
| group is just tight-lipped enough that the legal parts of
| the case take a long time. In the mean time, Twitter loses
| users who voice their objection via not giving Twitter its
| attention and moves on to an up-and-coming competitor.
|
| - The US elects a group of politicians who have
| authoritarian leanings (note that these could be extremists
| from either side of the politic spectrum, imho). This group
| of people lose power in legitimate elections. Via various
| levels of chicanery that revolve around undermining the
| spirit if not the law around the US election system, this
| group makes it so that they are able remain in power. Once
| they've started down that slippery slope, they just rewrite
| the laws so that they stay in power permanently. This group
| clamps down on free speech. The powers that be at Twitter
| object. A puppet leader loyal to the leading party is
| installed in order to manage Twitter out of existence, with
| a state-controlled competitor being supported in its place.
|
| - The US is successfully overtaken in war by another
| country. The powers that be at Twitter allow for speech
| against the occupiers. Twitter is shut down.
|
| - Twitter is found to have facilitated genocide in a
| foreign country (e.g., Myanmar), and the public revolts. To
| be honest, this will probably be overlooked, but I thought
| I would put it here as a thought exercise.
|
| Part of the problem with hypothetical black swan events is
| that they seem entirely impossible... until they happen.
| That's why they are black swan events.
| solardev wrote:
| There's a book called that by Nassim Taleb, about how
| extremely improbable events can have outsized impacts but
| can't be easily modeled...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory?wprov=sfti1
| wolfram74 wrote:
| I feel like the cheeky cop out answer is that since one
| definition of a black swan event is that no one could see
| it coming, it's impossible to give examples because then
| someone saw it coming :p
| riffic wrote:
| > black Swan events
|
| I think we might be experiencing this just in this year with
| its new ownership about to occur.
| artificialLimbs wrote:
| >> Twitter by all means is superior...
|
| I hear they have the greatest censorship. Some say the best
| censorship. Nobody does censorship like Twitter. Not even
| close.
| starfallg wrote:
| Closed source dies with the lack of money. Open source dies
| with the lack of users and attention. The problem is, money
| buys users. So for FOSS, it's a chicken and egg problem with
| the interplay of money and eyeballs.
| swyx wrote:
| what exactly happens to all the URLs that were linking to
| mastodon addresses? surely those are now going to die?
| mfer wrote:
| > This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by
| people who aren't looking to profit.
|
| People who aren't looking to make a profit (or even break even)
| means they are running a social media platform while funding it
| through some other means. What is that means of making money?
| What pays for the hosting and the time spent doing ops?
|
| You can't take money out of the equation because you have
| hosting costs at the least.
|
| How are things funded and why that way should be a
| conversation. Anything that ignores money ignores the reality
| of operating something on the Internet. That means it's not
| sustainable.
| teraflop wrote:
| "Trying to be self-funding" and "trying to make a profit" are
| very different things, and it doesn't make sense to conflate
| them.
|
| Even though funding wasn't the primary focus of this blog
| post, it seems to make it quite clear where the money was
| coming from: https://www.patreon.com/ashfurrow
| mfer wrote:
| Money was obviously an issue. $319 USD/month didn't cover
| the costs of running it. As noted in the post, "I've
| donated countless hours".
|
| Where is the line between "trying to make a profit" and
| "trying to be self-funding"?
|
| Trying to be funded off of donations is really hard and
| rarely works. Most of the time you need other funding
| models.
|
| If someone runs a biz where they run mastadon instances and
| the business breaks even (or just a little more) is that
| making a profit?
|
| How does an organization behind an instance make money to
| cover expenses? This has to be looked at.
| otikik wrote:
| There's lots of space between "not doing things for profit"
| and "not caring about money".
| gbro3n wrote:
| Though not a social service, the recent shutdown of Stadia is
| likely indicative of how corporate shut downs will be handled.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down.
| The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and
| whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they
| thank the admin(s) and move on.
|
| I'm understanding that the data is gone and you're bragging
| about the observation that the protocol still functions?
|
| I'm not sure this is an aspect any of us care about?
|
| I think we can all observe that a common interface for posting
| and interacting with people will remain and that no corporation
| right now can unilaterally change that. I don't think pointing
| that out in a thread about all of the data on that server being
| gone is a strength.
| BiggsHoson wrote:
| I was not part of your community, but thank you for what you've
| done with it.
|
| May you have all the needed grace, patience, wisdom, and strength
| (both physical and mental) to navigate this next stage of your
| life in caring for someone who needs you more than ever right
| now.
| bscphil wrote:
| Reminds me of a point I made about Pinboard. It's surprising to
| me that despite the success of open source software we haven't
| developed good systems for community administration of public
| services. Web services that aren't owned by large companies tend
| to be run with a bus factor of 1.
|
| > I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open
| source software development as well. For instance, when the
| developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community
| forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same
| approaches to handling administration of services that are useful
| to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for
| some movement in this direction, where a group of people can
| maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to
| the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon
| approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by
| individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26200441
| nixpulvis wrote:
| Public services like this have private databases, and owned
| domains. Both of which require clear plans for stewardship if
| you want to avoid these issues. Much like a non-profit still
| needs some organization and roles assigned to it's members, so
| too do FOSS (services).
| masukomi wrote:
| a couple people have mentioned it in passing, but i figured this
| warranted a top-level comment
|
| anyone considering setting up an instance and not wanting to
| worry about having to ssh in during the night and deal with
| maintence stuff just to talk with friends should 100% consider
| signing up with masto.host.
|
| I've had an instance there for months now.
|
| While there's some manual setup on his end (the guy who runs
| masto.host) from the perspective of someone wanting a new
| instance it's _very_ easy, and he does a great job of keeping
| everything up to date.
|
| I'm extremely happy to throw money his way each month and _not_
| have to worry about maintaining my instance beyond occasionally
| granting access to new users and proactively blocking remote
| instances. As a small, invite only, server I don't have to worry
| about a lot of BS from obnoxious humans.
|
| Note: if you use masto.host you don't get ssh access to your
| server so there are some settings you can't tweak. I'm ok with
| that in exchange for never having to worry about maintenance.
| BaldricksGhost wrote:
| Sorry to hear this. Family must come first.
|
| The mastodon.technology had some interesting folks. I've migrated
| my account to the mastodon.social instance. Moving accounts on
| Mastodon is pretty easy so that's a positive.
| pmarreck wrote:
| why is the maintenance cost of a Mastodon instance so high? What
| is the technology stack?
| InitEnabler wrote:
| Mastodon was created using the Ruby on Rails framework. Your
| able to quickly write applications at the cost of overhead from
| all the moving parts and the Ruby language in general (Though
| in recent years ruby has improved with the introduction of JIT
| into it's codebase).
| pmarreck wrote:
| Ah, that makes sense then.
|
| I started out in Ruby years ago; wonderful language, doesn't
| scale well.
|
| Someone should rewrite it in Phoenix...
|
| EDIT: Oh, someone did!
| https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
| premysl wrote:
| From my experience, both Mastodon and Pleroma are massively
| overcomplicated resource hogs that are hard to set up,
| configure, or navigate.
| pmarreck wrote:
| Pleroma too? Usually Elixir apps are much more efficient than
| RoR apps in my experience
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >Why Not Transfer to a New Admin? Users have put their trust in
| me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive
| amount of trust, since they'd have access to over a half decade
| of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users
| they have interacted with.
|
| I think that's a very salient and responsible choice. With the
| freenode debacle coming to mind immediately I think it's
| important to remember how risky a change of ownership can be in
| particular if the users are not aware of it. Certainly a painful
| decision to shut the instance down, but a decision with a lot of
| foresight. An active migration might create disarray but it also
| forces people to make an active choice to trust another host.
| pookha wrote:
| I don't at all think this is a reasonable choice. A group of
| like minded adults should be able to establish some form of
| stewardship. it's the basis for human civilization.
|
| That said the maintainer has my sincere prayers for his family
| and for his path in life.
| OrangeMonkey wrote:
| I am sad that they are shutting down but we have more options in
| the Fediverse still.
|
| Its the rebirth of the promise of a censorship free internet. A
| lot of people have decided that its time we shut peoples mouths
| and stop them from talking 'for the greater good' - this is a
| pushback against it.
|
| One day we will all remember why we should support free speech -
| god help us on that day.
| teawrecks wrote:
| IMO there's nothing wrong with passing the torch to a new
| maintainer, this is just part of the design of mastodon. People
| shouldn't arbitrarily trust an instance maintainer on mastodon
| any more than they should trust google, twitter, fb, or a tor
| node with their data. The info they chose to share in plain text
| with a mastodon instance should be considered compromised. All
| that matters is the future; where will you send your data going
| forward?
|
| It's part of the design of mastodon that the maintainer can pass
| the admin role to a new maintainer, and if a user doesn't
| approve, they can migrate to a new instance. If other instances
| don't approve, they can blacklist it.
| rglullis wrote:
| On the one hand, I am sad to hear about it and even more so due
| to the circumstances.
|
| On the other, I feel a bit validated in my belief that we need to
| have professionally managed instances on the fediverse.
| "Community Support" only goes so far. Thousands of people using a
| service, but how many of them actually help with its upkeep?
|
| I know that my instance has only a handful of paying users, and
| it is barely paying for itself, and far from paying all the work
| that I've put into it. But charging for access brings a lot of
| benefits: it keeps spammers and bots away, it is a good filter
| against trolls and best of all makes it _explicit_ what is
| expected of all parties.
| capableweb wrote:
| Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for
| access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like
| $1/month or something.
|
| Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K
| users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost
| involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right
| (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth"
| and so on, looking at you AWS).
| rglullis wrote:
| Because most people don't want to pay for something that they
| (think) can get for free.
|
| The other problem is that charging $1/month is a practical
| pain in the ass. For micropayments, processors will easily
| take 20-30% of that.
| dangus wrote:
| Annual billing would solve for that.
| rglullis wrote:
| Yes, but you are also asking for a bigger commitment.
|
| One solution that I implemented in communick as an
| attempt to solve both cases: sell group packages. Let one
| person pay for a group of 5-10 people. This way you can
| still have a monthly subscription and you lose less money
| to the payment processors. I was also hoping that would
| help with network effects, as it would be an incentive
| for one person to bring others along. Alas, I think I am
| the only "customer" from my own service that has been
| using this functionality.
| sneak wrote:
| $1500/mo does not even begin to cover a single 24/7 oncall
| devops person's rate.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I think capableweb's comment is an unintentionally good
| example of the fact that a lot of people don't understand
| how much it takes to run these sorts of things. The comment
| was in the dimension of money, but I'm sure there is a
| similar lack of information attending the dimensions of
| people and time as well.
| capableweb wrote:
| I think bilbo0s's comment is an unintentionally good
| example of the fact that a lot of people don't understand
| how little it takes to run these sort of things if you
| know what you're doing.
|
| "The cloud" has ruined people thinking that everything
| has to cost 10x or even 100x compared to what it would
| cost if you just spend some time learning about
| administration yourself and set up a dedicated instance
| instead of using anything cloud.
|
| As an exercise, without looking it up beforehand, what
| kind of hardware do you think HN runs on and how much
| they pay for that per month?
|
| Also, $1500/month is a proper salary in many places in
| the world. Not everyone lives in a metropolitan city
| where wages tend to be much, much higher.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| To be fair, that devops person would probably not need to
| do anything 23 out of those 24 hours on 6 out of 7 of those
| days.
|
| If you use sane software, running a server is not a lot of
| work.
| intelVISA wrote:
| What if I'm stuck in YAML hell?!
| jacooper wrote:
| Well if only having your own server on Mastodon was realistic,
| instead its totally impossible to get discovered.
|
| There is fix for this, which is Fedverse Relays, but guess what
| ? Mastodons official servers don't use them.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| That simply isn't true. I'm a nobody and plenty of folk have
| found me from seemingly inane posts. People have found me out
| of the blue, from across the Fediverse, and I have no idea
| why; all I do know is we now chat frequently and without
| either of us even looking for one another. What's impossible
| is to discover how to use a platform without reading the
| documentation, and assuming that algorithms will just do the
| work for us.
| rglullis wrote:
| I need to understand this obsession with "getting discovered
| _via the application itself_ ".
|
| I mean, what's the problem of using other means of
| communication to publish/promote your identity?
|
| I am far from being internet famous, and I get at least one
| follower every week on Mastodon simply because I put it on my
| Twitter bio.
| eoinboylan wrote:
| All the best Ash, thank you!
| leashless wrote:
| Why the hell doesn't Mastadon encrypt data at rest so the admins
| aren't responsible for user privacy?
|
| What the _hell_? Is this the 1990s?
| detaro wrote:
| I don't think "encryption at rest" is what you want, because it
| doesn't help you against the admin if the app still can/has to
| be able to decrypt it?
|
| Encryption at rest protects against someone walking away with
| the database, not an admin.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| Encryption isn't mentioned once in the whole Activity Pub
| spec.
|
| Encryption at rest isn't good enough. E2E should be the
| default on federated protocols with breakouts for public
| content only needing to be signed.
| mariusor wrote:
| ActivityPub is a transport protocol. The content of an
| ActivityPub object can be anything, including a stream of
| bytes coming from an E2E encrypted exchange.
| noirscape wrote:
| Aw man. That sucks but it's totally understandable.
| Mastodon.technology was the first instance I ever joined back
| when someone told me what the fediverse was. I eventually left
| because I wanted to selfhost, but the general warm reception I
| got on that instance made me think the fediverse could really go
| places.
|
| Best of luck in the future and best of luck with your family.
| majso wrote:
| Is there a way to host my own micro-instance/identity server
| instead of always migrating from one public instance to another?
| arcatech wrote:
| Yup. Host a single-user instance.
| throwaway-jim wrote:
| will they be able to migrate their profiles?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Yes, mostly.
|
| Mastodon supports both _migrating your profile_ (followers and
| block lists, as well as metadata, but NOT content), AND
| _exporting your content_ (posts, replies, and media uploads).
|
| The process is pretty straightforward, and I've done this
| myself. You _will_ lose your old content 's persistent URL
| references, though _federated_ copies of that content may still
| be accessible from other instances.
|
| See:
|
| Moving or leaving accounts:
| <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>
|
| It's also possible to move an entire _instance_ to a new
| machine:
|
| Migrating to a new machine:
| <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/>
| braingenious wrote:
| What an interesting turn of events.
|
| As somebody that used to be an admin of a decently large
| community, here's some free advice for anybody that's trying to
| start something like this:
|
| Get mods. Get them early. Get them from the pool of your most
| enthusiastic users. Fire them when they perform poorly.
| Continuity plans will be a lot easier to come up with if you've
| been sharing the burden of managing the community for a long
| time, heck they might even be emergent and obvious after long
| enough.
| tootie wrote:
| The solution to silicon valley hegemony just isn't
| decentralization. It's non-profit leadership. Think Wikipedia.
| Think NPR. The model doesn't even really need to change from an
| ad-based revenue model so long as there isn't a bullwhip at the
| backs of execs demands grow or die. Just keep revenue as close to
| break even as possible with enough cushion for a downturn.
| guywithahat wrote:
| I don't think Wikipedia and NPR have aged that well though,
| there are lots of topics where they're essentially (or
| literally) paid propaganda for their major donors and because
| they're a non-profit it's less clear what's what than if they
| had paid advertisements
| blep_ wrote:
| Do you have examples?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Current Affairs_ recently ran "NPR Is Not Your Friend",
| which highlights some of the issues:
|
| <https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-
| frien...>
|
| The upshot of that piece is that NPR itself remains part of
| the neoliberal ideological propaganda apparatus:
|
| _Like all press outlets, NPR has a particular point of
| view. Its bias is just as profound as the likes of MSNBC or
| Fox News. NPR's ideological bias is toward what we might
| call the American bipartisan consensus._
|
| My sense is that both NPR and Wikipedia have performed
| admirably, and far better than their commercial
| counterparts, but that there remain pitfalls with both
| _any_ organisation _and_ those which are based on nonprofit
| / NGO models, particularly in terms of sponsor / donor
| capture.
|
| The NonProfit Quarterly's podcast Tiny Spark frequently
| discusses such issues. It seems to be on hiatus but its
| back-catalogue has numerous episodes dedicated to the
| topic:
|
| <https://nonprofitquarterly.org/tiny-spark/>
|
| One of the voices heard several times on that topic has
| been Rob Reich of Stanford (not to be confused with former
| US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, at UC Berkeley), who's
| written and spoken on issues of philanthropy. Several
| articles are listed in his ... Wikipedia ... bio:
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reich#Articles>
|
| I suspect that the OP had another take on this, which I
| find less credible.
| tootie wrote:
| Idk what you're referring to but absolutely no human
| enterprise of any kind will be immune to corruption or
| ineptitude. It's 100% guaranteed to happen sometimes even in
| a communist Star Trek utopia. All we can ever do is remove or
| mitigate the incentives to serve purely selfish goals. Public
| media is substantially less corruptible than corporate media
| but there are no absolutes.
| HankB99 wrote:
| Ash: I'm sorry to hear about the health issue that precipitated
| this. I wish you the best outcome but realize that that does not
| always happen.
|
| Rest: As someone who does not (yet) use Mastodon, I'm curious
| about the impact of a single node shutting down. At least in this
| case this is happening in an orderly manner and with warning.
|
| I'm also curious if this is a problem with Mastodon in general or
| did this particular node just become too popular for its own
| good. I seem to recall that some instances (Adam Curry's No
| Agenda related instance) limiting membership. Or perhaps I'm
| thinking of something else. But that may not help if the problem
| is traffic generated by the entire network as seems to be hinted
| at in the post.
|
| Please excuse my ignorance of how Mastodon operates that may be
| implicit in my questions.
| berkes wrote:
| Mastodon has a migration path for users to move to other
| instances. So when the server admins allow it (i.e. don't just
| shutdown, or kick someone off) moving is rather easy.
|
| Today, several in my mastodon timeline mentioned they finished
| the move. But without them mentioning, I, an outstander (i'm on
| another instance) wouldn't notice it.
|
| What will happen, though, is that a portion of the users won't
| migrate. Either because they forget, or they can't be bothered,
| are "zombie accounts", or because its too challenging: it does
| involve down- and uploading and/or copypasting zips/datafiles.
| This means a bit of pruning or culling, and that could be
| considered good, IDK.
|
| What will also happen, on a more technical level, is that other
| instances and maybe bots and automation will hit timeouts and
| connection errors when it really shuts down. Most instances and
| fediverse software can handle this just fine, it's built with
| this mind; it might at most cause some overhead and load. Some
| flakey or poorly developed software might crash or break (for a
| moment).
| orblivion wrote:
| > Today, several in my mastodon timeline mentioned they
| finished the move. But without them mentioning, I, an
| outstander (i'm on another instance) wouldn't notice it.
|
| Do you mean that part of the protocol allows for a migration
| process that includes changing who your follows are pointing
| at? (assuming all servers involved are up to date and have
| this feature) I.e. did your account automatically start
| following your friends' new accounts?
| [deleted]
| nightpool wrote:
| Yes. The process has three steps: First, you update the
| receiving profile to "allow" the move by pointing at each
| other using the as:alsoKnownAs relationship. This allows
| everybody to confirm that the receiving account is
| participating in the move, and authorizes it. Then, you
| update your old account with the "movedTo" property, so
| that any new users who look up your account will see a
| notification that you've moved. Finally, you send out a
| Move activity to all of your followers, pointing at the new
| account. Automatically, all of your old followers who
| receive the Move activity will send Follow activities to
| the new "receiving" profile.
|
| This process doesn't update any of the old content from
| your account, which was regarded at the time as a necessary
| simplification because of the issues of updating canonical
| URIs for accounts on one system to accounts on another
| system (different software might have different expected
| routes, you might need to store lookup tables, etc etc. It
| just opens up a huge can of worms). In practice this
| doesn't really matter that much since Mastodon is used
| primarily for microblogging and less for, well, actual
| blogging. If you were designing a more fully-featured
| social blogging platform like a Medium or Tumblr equivalent
| you'd probably want to put some more thought into that side
| of things.
| ihuman wrote:
| If it doesn't update the old content on your old account,
| then is there a way to copy the old content to your new
| account?
| alexvoda wrote:
| I imagine that is what ggg-parent meant by: "it does
| involve down- and uploading and/or copypasting
| zips/datafiles."
| colatkinson wrote:
| Yeah, this is how it works. I don't know the technical
| details/internal terminology, but I've definitely had a few
| accounts I follow switch servers for various reasons. It
| was basically just "oh hey so-and-so's handle changed" from
| my perspective, which is kinda neat.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > a migration path for users to move to other instances
|
| Thanks for clarifying - without that bit of background, this
| post reads like, "if I can't have it, no one can". But I
| guess the post is directed at people who do understand the
| background behind mastodon in general (which I and OP
| didn't).
| bondarchuk wrote:
| Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a cryptographic
| verification based on a private key held by the user, so that
| they can prove to other servers/users that they are the same
| account as one that existed on a server that has shut down
| already? Is there something like that in Mastodon?
| KvanteKat wrote:
| It doesn't involve cryptography, but mastodon has for at
| least a couple of years supported link-verification in
| profiles (it basically checks if a link back to your
| mastodon profile exists on a page linked on your profile),
| so a linking to a page that only you credibly control (say,
| a personal website) is the de-facto system of decentralized
| user-verification on mastodon.
|
| Edit: supported since 2018
| https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8703
| jefftk wrote:
| It does sort of involve crypto: if the page you control
| weren't served over HTTPS it wouldn't be too hard (DNS
| poisoning) for someone else to trick a server into
| verifying the wrong user.
| Kye wrote:
| I think most people in this situation do the same thing
| people do on Twitter when it suspends an account for
| nonsense reasons like telling a Nazi to eat paste: make
| another, make a post, share it with a few friends off
| Twitter/Mastodon, have them RT/boost to circulate it within
| their circles. This seems to work pretty well.
|
| Cryptographic certainty is fun to think about, but
| sometimes you just need people.
| ElCheapo wrote:
| Well, seems like this is a clear path for improvement: a
| decent UI tool for migration between instances
| rapnie wrote:
| Such mechanism already exists. Look for the comment by
| @nightpool
|
| It works best between Mastodon instances, but between
| different apps the migrations are often also supported. New
| apps like GoToSocial have the migration still as open issue
| sitting in their tracker, but will support as well.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| A know a fair amount of Fedi folk who have moved instances. The
| move feature means we haven't lost touch, that they haven't
| lost their network. Some have even moved to start their own
| instance, or chose to move elsewhere. Whilst I am sure many
| lament not being able to bring posts to a new account, they can
| be exported and it's one's network which is most important.
|
| I myself moved off mastodon.technology when I didn't agree with
| a change to the ToS, and was banned from mastodon.social
| without reason or redress, and neither event meant I had to
| start from scratch.
| INTPenis wrote:
| We're already seeing hundreds of people migrating to other
| nodes.
| noirscape wrote:
| Very little actually. Depending on how the shutdown works in
| practice, the impact is basically nothing. Other instances just
| stop receiving updates from the instance, which just results in
| the users in the closed instance being cached artifacts (zombie
| accounts) that need to be cleaned out manually.
|
| There's also a "self destruct" feature in Mastodon which is the
| nice way to shut down an instance; it issues account deletion
| messages for every account to every instance it federates with.
| The idea being that this results in the federating instances
| processing the account deletions accurately.
|
| As for requests to the original server; basically all instance
| software (Mastodon included) implement a backoff mechanism,
| meaning that if after 3 months your server is still returning
| 404s when requesting new information, the software will quietly
| stop requesting new info unless explicitly asked to do so by a
| user.
| andrewallbright wrote:
| The unnerving thing about this post is just how I could very
| realistically find myself in similar shoes. I do many things and
| bet on my ability to learn as I go. Sometimes it does take some
| extra hours. Time is finite.
|
| Why bravery to say "I don't know; I could probably find out but I
| cannot."
| carlchenet wrote:
| Enthousiasm is paramount in community work. But managing server
| infrastructure is more and more complex and it won't go simpler.
| People should consider joining associations which would be
| responsible, not individuals. Maybe less servers but larger and
| better managed ones. Associations are more resilient than
| individuals.
| sneak wrote:
| m-p-3 wrote:
| Props to the instance for doing whatever they can to let people
| migrate their account somewhere else, and Mastodon has some
| provision already in place to create an alias and easily move
| your followers from one instance to another.
| mattdesl wrote:
| That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the
| server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to
| another person.
|
| Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO.
|
| - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued
| maintenance.
|
| - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than
| entrusted with a single administrator.
|
| - People don't want to self-host.
|
| The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name
| aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of
| nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public
| keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart
| contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single
| controller.
|
| [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
|
| [2] https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol
| i5heu wrote:
| > - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their
| continued maintenance.
|
| you can move your account to another instance in about 2
| Minutes of work
|
| > - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather
| than entrusted with a single administrator.
|
| There is no "private data" on mastodon, I think it gets
| communicated enough that admins will have access to direct
| massages. it even says to you "Posts on Mastodon are not end-
| to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over
| Mastodon."
|
| if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;)
|
| > - People don't want to self-host.
|
| True MOST ppl don't want to host, but they are a few that like
| it and even get money for providing a public service. So I
| don't have to host smth, I just have to find someone hosting
| it.
| olah_1 wrote:
| > you can move your account to another instance in about 2
| Minutes of work
|
| Maybe 2 minutes for the technical side, then 2 months of
| getting all your old followers to follow you at your new
| address.
|
| > if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;)
|
| Or use a different protocol...
| mattdesl wrote:
| Account migration is a redirect. Your posts do not carry
| over, and the experience is pretty clunky.[1] Your name alias
| is tied to the server you created it on, rather than tied to
| your identity and all that it carries (posts, data, network
| effects, followers).
|
| Social networks should have private data and E2EE, plain and
| simple. And the hosting challenges and centralization is why
| we are here discussing Mastodon.
|
| [1] https://edtechfactotum.com/migrating-to-a-new-mastodon-
| home/
| anaganisk wrote:
| So it boils down to purchasing an NFT to participate, if yes,
| I'm not sure how long it will last. I've been trying to get a
| namespace on ENS since forever, and no payment processor wants
| me to buy eth. If that itself is a major hurdle I'm not sure
| how people will ever join.
| mattdesl wrote:
| I don't believe it will feel like this. "Buying an NFT" will
| be more like "paying for a service." You visit a Farcaster
| client, and click the buy account name/domain button, it
| triggers a stripe payment, and then you are given a private
| key for the account.
|
| A savvy user could circumvent this and use the blockchain
| directly if they want to pay in crypto and/or cut down on the
| payment processing fee.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| This is why I haven't gotten into mastodon. What server do I
| choose? At best they're internet forums from the 90s where the
| admin eventually has to move on (for often valid reasons, like in
| this case.)
|
| Also why does this random guy have MY data? Why does he need to
| trust a new admin with my data for a succession plan to be
| possible?
|
| I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed. Mastodon
| federated at the wrong granularity.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| > I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed.
|
| Where do you host _your_ blog?
|
| If all you are doing is consuming blogs then yeah RSS is a lot
| easier than choosing a Mastodon instance.
|
| But if all you want is to just consume Mastodon, you can do
| that with RSS too. Almost every public profile in Mastodon has
| an RSS feed that's easy to discover (and most auto-discovery
| tools will do it for you).
|
| The complication, _just as with Blogs_ come from when you want
| to post. With RSS you still have to pick a blog host. Do you
| pick one of the big name cloud hosts like Blogger.com,
| Wordpress.com, or Medium.com? Do you pick a smaller host or
| self-host? If that, which blogging software or static site
| generator do you want?
|
| Mastodon federated at the exact "same" granularity as RSS, it's
| just that generally more people _assume_ they will post on
| Mastodon today (and more people have private /semi-private
| feeds) rather than just only consume public feeds. Choosing an
| instance is _exactly_ like choosing a blog host. There are the
| big giant instances that are easier to get started but you
| "own" less control of them. There are the small community
| instances. There are instance hosting providers. There are
| plenty of opportunities to self-host if you have the technical
| determination. There are even multiple software options to
| consider: Mastodon, Pleroma, Mastodon-forks like Hometown,
| Pixelfed, and many more (those are just the ones off the top of
| my head that federate with the ActivityPub "Fediverse").
|
| Trusting an instance admin is just like trusting a blog hosting
| provider. They have "your data" because you've asked them to
| host it for you.
| mariusor wrote:
| > I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed.
|
| With all due respect an RSS feed is not "your" data, it's just
| data that you aggregated. You're not comparing it to the
| fediverse in good faith. If you must make a comparison you can
| do it with email: do you have an email address? Do you trust
| your email provider with your data? It's the same with
| ActivityPub based servers.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| I pay a monthly fee to a business for my mail server, and I
| chose a business that makes data privacy a top selling point.
|
| Tweets are microblogs. RSS technology is fine for publishing
| them. The Twitter client only needs to be an RSS reader.
| Replies, retweets, and likes are empty calories for end
| users. They're the engagement bait social media uses to power
| an attention economy.
|
| The fediverse copied the wrong features. There's no point for
| it to have an attention economy because no one is monetizing
| the attention. Therefore there's no need for the empty
| calorie features, and no need for my data to be on someone
| else's server.
| mariusor wrote:
| Your perspective on "empty calories" social engagement is
| very narrow in my opinion, because you seem to equate all
| social interactions by the measure of existing, objectively
| bad, services. I think that over time the rise of small
| indie servers that will work on a social graph but in a
| similar way to email, will prove that "meaningful" social
| networks can exist, and my personal hope is that they won't
| be focusing on monetization. I don't see any reason why
| companies won't be able to build on that and offer you the
| same guarantees about your data that your email company
| gives you.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| My position is that anonymous conversation is low value
| and a more advanced internet society will not do it much.
| The "meaningful" social networks you theorize will be
| meaningful specifically because anonymous conversation is
| absent. If someone posts something interesting I'll DM
| them about it somehow because I'll know them well enough
| to do that. Replying on Twitter is the equivalent of
| sending Reply-All emails to the whole company.
| mariusor wrote:
| Yet here we are doing just fine having that anonymous
| conversation. It won't change your life, but I bet you
| found out a thing or two from this thread.
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| Empty calories in our information diet.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Well, where do you expect your data to be stored? In the ether?
| [deleted]
| somehnacct3757 wrote:
| On a server that I personally own or rent. Why does my data
| need to be anywhere else?
| 3371 wrote:
| Oh, you sound like exactly a new fediverse user.
| shadowfacts wrote:
| So then run an instance yourself on your own server?
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| I think the entire point is that those concerned about those
| things and who have the technical ability will create their own
| instances. And invite their network to their instance. As I
| understand it (probably poorly), people generally shouldn't
| just be joining random instances that end up getting really
| large, but rather there should be a LOT of instances, all
| interconnected, that are effectively run by the handful of
| "techies" in each given network. But sadly we still gravitate
| to a centralized model, trying to find the "right instance" to
| join, even though (again, as I understand it), people can
| communicate cross-instance just fine (assuming not blocked,
| etc.) I say this as someone who does not actually use Mastodon,
| I just haven't found the reason, even though I know folks whose
| instance I could likely join.
| rglullis wrote:
| If you don't trust anyone with your data, just host it
| yourself.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| I had been worried about this with respect to Mastodon for a long
| time.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30447645
|
| I think it was only a matter of time before the human resources
| issue came front and center. My hope is that there can be a good
| balance between small federated instances kept alive by
| altruistic volunteer admins and larger instances with enough
| moderation and funding to handle the number of users that a
| social network expects but increase centralization. Maybe the
| conclusion will be that no matter how the technology scales,
| finding a way for the instances to be kept alive will be a social
| problem that requires constant attention.
|
| The reliability issue also makes me wonder how much of the
| Fediverse is setting itself up for link rot and the loss of
| unique content after their maintainers lose passion or move on.
| And that wouldn't be because of a business decision that is hard
| to empathize with (in the case of Google+), but simply because a
| single human body has its limits.
| throwawayKiwi9 wrote:
| At least from a design perspective, I would highly encourage
| users to check out Secure Scuttlebutt. It solves many problems
| highlighted here. Dominic Tarr really did some excellent work
| building it.
| lorealpnis wrote:
| Is "migrating to another server" as simple as singing up on other
| servers? Or is there a different straightforward way?
| fleg wrote:
| Moving to another instance is pretty easy:
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration
|
| It doesn't move your toots, but followers don't have to do
| anything to still follow you on your new account.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| > It doesn't move your toots
|
| does that even count as migrating then
| smcn wrote:
| Of course it does, but I do agree that it would be better
| if it did.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| No seriously, I'm not being sarcastic.
|
| You can't call keeping merely the contacts without emails
| themselves "migration of email provider". It makes no
| sense.
|
| Also, you said "follower[s] don't have to do anything",
| but somehow you (the followee) on the other hand needs to
| actively move? What if my follower is on this instance
| too and they don't actively move? Shouldn't their account
| disappear (and you lost your follower)? I genuinely don't
| understand how it would work other than everyone has to
| manually move together.
| smcn wrote:
| I'm not the person who said that but I can take a swing
| at it:
|
| If the person does not migrate off of the instance,
| they'll lose the account and yes, you'll lose a follower.
| But if they do migrate, both of you keep the connection.
| smcn wrote:
| False equivalence, it's a _social network_, and you can,
| indeed, migrate your social network.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's mistaking the map for the terrain. It's a
| networked system for leaving and retrieving messages.
| It's not a group of friends. The way you expect to
| migrate a messaging system is by moving the messages.
| smcn wrote:
| To confirm, I wish they would migrate posts, too, but I
| do not believe that the lack of that means that you
| cannot call it a migration.
|
| However, your definition seems overly pedantic? It
| defines itself[0] as a social network with an emphasis on
| audience. Messaging is merely the method of interaction.
|
| [Edit] "audience" is incorrect, I should've said "people"
|
| 0: https://joinmastodon.org/
| pessimizer wrote:
| A "social network" is a networked system for leaving and
| retrieving messages. Again, it is not a group of friends.
| It is a messaging system _for_ a group of friends, just
| like a map is a graphical system _for_ navigating a piece
| of terrain.
| smcn wrote:
| Sorry, wait, also you're definition of social network is
| incorrect. It /is/ a group of friends. It's a network
| made up of social relationships.
|
| Think of it like business networking, but for your
| friends. The connection itself is what matters.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's what "social networking" is, but not what a
| "social networking website" is. Social networks don't
| require computers or websites.
| [deleted]
| smcn wrote:
| It seems as though you're putting emphasis on the wrong
| thing. Mastodon clearly believe the emphasis is on the
| _network_, as in, the people you follow and who follow
| you.
|
| But I'm not entirely sure why you're arguing semantics
| with me. It can, by their definition, be considered
| migration.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > It seems as though you're putting emphasis on the wrong
| thing.
|
| No, I'm just trying to be clear. If you can't move your
| messages in a messenger, you're not doing migration.
|
| > It can, by their definition, be considered migration.
|
| Their definition doesn't even require software. If they
| (and you) are trying to say that Mastodon is a group of
| friends, I'm going to beg to differ and say that it is a
| computer program that supports messaging.
|
| edit: and why I'm going on an on about it? I'm clearly
| being persnickety, but because I think it's an important
| distinction, especially irt expectations that a user
| would have. The mystery for me is why you would insist
| that a messaging system that can't migrate messages has
| implemented migration.
| smcn wrote:
| It's not a messenger, though. It's a social network.
|
| And you can disagree with that, just as I do you.
|
| Post migration still supports messaging.
| smcn wrote:
| You're not making a distinction, you're classifying it
| incorrectly. Containing a messaging component does not
| make it a messenger.
|
| It's a social network, it clearly believes that the
| connections between people is the most important part of
| its offering. It can migrate a user and their
| connections.
|
| Again, I would enjoy it if it did take posts, too, but
| clearly they disagree. I'm not going to say that they
| cannot claim it to be a migration as a result of that.
| rocky1138 wrote:
| This is almost exactly what happened with me hosting my GNU
| Social instance, kwat.chat. I enjoyed the community and the
| feeling that I was helping the fediverse. I let my users know
| well in advance it was closing down so they had time to move to
| another instance.
| freewizard wrote:
| Hope things go well for Ash.
|
| Gaps/opportunities for Fediverse community:
|
| - sustainable mgmt structure and plan for large nodes
|
| - features to import content while not breaking existing
| ecosystem (it's currently possible to move followers and export
| content only, but not import)
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm going to be frank, as a long time federated node admin. In
| the last few years I've seen so many admins act just like Ash.
| They have a huge heart and a lot of passion for federation. So
| they open their doors to thousands of users.
|
| And I keep thinking that it's just not sustainable. I've worked
| in ops for over 20 years, I feel like that background has given
| me a healthy scepticism and a respect for Murphy's law.
|
| So when I launched my Mastodon instance 4 years ago I decided
| from day 1 that it should be focused on my country, my language,
| and require new users to request access.
|
| Just like the old BBS scene, you have to write a short motivation
| on why you want an account. This motivation is 100% for vetting
| out robots. Because let me tell you, I get on average 2 robots a
| week trying to sign up. Why? I have no idea. But my strategy has
| brought the number of spam robots on my instance down to 0.
|
| I could never imagine being one of those admins who just left
| their doors wide open. Because I've been online since the 90s, I
| know how we used to exploit web services back in the day. I was
| part of that whole 4chan scene, doing online hooliganism.
|
| If you're opening your doors to anyone, and hosting their content
| online on your domain, there is a whole slew of problems coming
| your way. And the "main" instance mastodon.social got to feel
| that when an AV vendor blacklisted them. Someone had been using
| their public profile to host C&C. Of course, why wouldn't they?
|
| So now I see a very sad thing, my fellow admins are begging for
| rent and food money on Mastodon. Because they're spending so much
| money keeping their instance running. And God only knows how many
| robot accounts are taking up those resources.
|
| I've said this so many times, but I'll keep saying it; keep the
| instances small and put focus on federation rather than fast
| growth. We want many, small, well connected instances rather than
| a few huge monoliths that need corporate money to keep going.
|
| I don't care what all the naysayers in this thread are whining
| about, ActivityPub is amazing. Until someone launches a
| completely decentralized network that WORKS, AP is the one for
| me. Scuttlebutt looks interesting though.
|
| I'll never get over the magic of looking at my public timeline
| and seeing posts cascade in from all over the world. A dozen
| different software platforms, some homemade, some unpublished,
| some open source projects, they're all talking. Thousands of
| forums from dozens of countries are all communicating with MY
| little instance. It's magic.
| seti0Cha wrote:
| How hard is it to get connected to other instances? Is this
| done through personal relationships or prior history or can a
| complete outsider get involved? I know exactly zero people
| using Mastodon (that I'm aware of) but this sounds interesting
| and makes me want to try to set something up.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I believe Mastodon servers (and presumably, most of the rest)
| have a bootstrap list of other instances which they
| automatically federate with. If a user attempts to interact
| with an instance unknown to the server it then reaches out
| and begins federation. The user can follow, reply to and read
| the content on that server immediately, although sometimes it
| can take a little time for a full list of posts and profile
| data to appear. Admins can also choose various levels of
| blocking against federation of instances of their choice.
|
| As a user this is all transparent. I follow loads of people
| from all over the Fedi (some of them not even microblogging
| platforms) and it basically just works.
| 3371 wrote:
| From my very little experience, you can search for anyone in
| any instance as long as it's federating with the whole
| network.
|
| The actual problem is... to know the person. There are no
| more suggestions from algorithms and no more million-
| followers accounts that you usually heard of, you need to dig
| to find people you find interesting.
| cde-v wrote:
| Is this the company that was always begging for engineers here on
| HN?
| samatman wrote:
| My condolences to the admin, this is sad news.
|
| This strengthens my conviction that federation is a bad
| architecture for something like Mastodon. A fully distributed
| system, urbit being the easiest to try right now, can't stick
| someone with the responsibility to keep a bunch of other people
| online. It can't stick those people with the responsibility to
| move off the server. Each user runs a server process, locally or
| on a remote machine. If any of those goes offline, all the
| services and data it was providing are gone, but no other user
| accounts are affected.
|
| Federation works fine for Matrix, although I still think the full
| peer architecture will dominate long-term. It's less disruptive
| to something like chat to switch user names because a homeserver
| shuts down.
|
| Mastodon instances get linked into, and all those links are going
| to break. Running a redirect for those URLs to the numerous new
| account homes is impractical given that a lack of time and
| commitment to server maintenance is the issue.
| asim wrote:
| Doing full P2P just isn't there yet. It makes total sense but
| without talking about some web3 Blockchain, it's hard to get
| everyone to run a distributed database, identity server, etc
| without it being some single binary.
| 5560675260 wrote:
| An RSS reader does almost everything I'd expect my fully
| distributed Twitter instance to do. Only thing missing is
| ability to post, packaged into the same client.
| ephbit wrote:
| RSS doesn't let people lead discussions through their
| posts, or did I get something wrong about RSS?
| 5560675260 wrote:
| Somehow this usecase completely eluded me when I've
| sought about how easy it is to setup a way for publishing
| updates / receiving updates from people you're subscribed
| to. I can't think of a way for getting content from
| random commenters in a discussion with a passive RSS-like
| subscription. At least not without forcing OP to host
| links to everyone's comments, or involving a third party.
| Kye wrote:
| Used to be people would follow blogs through RSS as
| people made posts, response posts, etc. The quality of
| discussion was much higher.
| zeroclip wrote:
| This is where blockchain ends up shining, since there are
| economic incentives to running a node.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I wonder if for groups up to a certain size, every client
| could hold all of the data for the group. I think clients
| do this anyway for caching purposes, but it would mean that
| as long as any client still had the data, the room wouldn't
| vanish.
|
| It doesn't scale so well, but if there were an easy ability
| to (say) plug in an S3 bucket URL for offloading older
| media, then it might work for quite a while.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > it's hard to get everyone to run a distributed database,
| identity server, etc without it being some single binary.
|
| Then it's a real problem that people keep doing these
| projects in Ruby and PHP. It was a problem that was
| ultimately laughed off when Diaspora chose it, and it's a
| problem that continues to linger and continues to be laughed
| off.
|
| Make it a single-binary that uses a couple sqlite files in a
| ~/.directory, and people won't mind running their own server.
| They could opt to proxy their traffic through a caching
| intermediary, and we could still federate those caching
| intermediaries. Being a mule for social traffic could be a
| commodity service if social were standardized properly.
| Ideally, one would be able to flip a switch and adjust a few
| dials on one's own instance to become a caching intermediary
| for others.
| asim wrote:
| This is sort of like the ideal and I think after ruby and
| php moving on to a new language that can compile down to a
| self executable makes sense. Whether it's rust or Go to
| whatever else doesn't matter as much as just taking a new
| shot at writing something that works.
|
| I half heartedly look at one of my own projects written in
| Go and wonder if it would fit the criteria but still some
| work to do. At the end of the day most people don't want to
| run anything and those that do end up with pages of
| documentation and maintenance burden.
| samatman wrote:
| Urbit exists right now, anyone with a command line can
| download it, create a comet, and see what they think.
|
| It can't be denied that it's a practical option, given that
| there are thousands (maybe in the tens?) of users who are
| doing stuff on the network.
|
| There's a lot of work which needs to be done, to make the
| core event loop faster, and enable scaling to the kind of
| social graph celebrities have. I'm confident in the technical
| leadership of the project at this point in time.
|
| Full disclosure: I've been a user of urbit for many years,
| and stand to benefit materially if it becomes popular. I
| neither work on urbit nor on urbit things, never have, and
| have invested no money in either urbit or its address space.
|
| I still think it's a good idea, just like I did when it was
| barely usable and much weirder.
| imdoor wrote:
| I think you could create a system that's resilient to such
| issues even with federation (not saying it's easy, though), and
| Matrix actually has a solution in the works for this -
| decentralised user accounts [1].
|
| And all of this makes me wonder - maybe it's better to re-
| implement something like Mastodon on top of Matrix. If Matrix
| adopts decentralised user accounts, that would seemingly solve
| such issues _automatically_. There was a POC Matrix based
| Twitter clone demonstrating this, actually [2] (but without the
| decentralised accounts yet).
|
| [1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/246
|
| [2] https://github.com/hackervera/freebird
| Arathorn wrote:
| We're hoping to make progress on decentralised accounts on
| Matrix by the end of the year.
|
| https://cerulean.matrix.org is another POC Matrix based
| Twitter clone (built for Jack & Parag) that demonstrates this
| (but without decentralised accounts yet).
| anderspitman wrote:
| Thanks for your hard work Ash, and sorry to hear about your loved
| one.
|
| As much as I love the Fediverse, I think the culture leans toward
| instances that are too big. I think the number of people on each
| instance should be much closer to 1 than 1000.
|
| The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average
| person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting
| shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing
| an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS,
| NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more
| difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be
| sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run
| on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling
| out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets
| you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs
| automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for
| end-to-end encryption.
| wan_ala wrote:
| Honestly I think some big issues are that not everyone has a
| fast machine thats going to be up all the time to host the
| instance. It would be cool to implement something like
| BitTorrent but for websites.
| abustamam wrote:
| Isn't that what IPFS aims to be?
|
| https://ipfs.io/
| rtpg wrote:
| I think part of it is there are instances that are just sooooo
| broad. Mastodon.social ... shouldn't exist? I think. It's too
| broad and kinda duplicates the general social network issues of
| everyone using the thing.
|
| Meanwhile there are loads of three-digit-user instances that
| are more focused (and have less problems on a tech level, and
| on a social level)
| seydor wrote:
| Weakness of running a decentralized service: no money made, which
| means you have to give and keep on giving. The solution is to
| decentralize the hosting itself instead of leeching off the work
| of a few individuals. Mastodon credentials should use something
| like a bittorrent/blockchain db. It s ok to lose the posts
|
| Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating
| https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
| i5heu wrote:
| One could argue that instagram and Facebook where not
| profitable in for many many years too.
| seydor wrote:
| That would be a) false because their creators were having
| high incomes anyway and b) irrelevant because mastodon will
| be unprofitable forever
| i5heu wrote:
| So you want to say that the Mastodon gGmbH that employees
| at least 1 developer and runs mastodon.social is not
| profitable?
|
| I would check my notes on that.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > I want to give you as much time as possible to download your
| data and migrate to a new server.
|
| Does it mean you can download your messages and put them back in
| the global conversation ? How does that work ? Are those messages
| stored only on one instance ? Do they disappear forever when an
| instance disappears ? Will users switch to new identity from
| another instance and import messages or is this lost ?
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| You can download and save your social network, filters, block
| lists, profile and all of your posts. Separately there's a
| feature to move accounts, which redirect folk to your new
| account and performs an automatic follow of your network from
| your new account. Posts are not migrated. If an instance
| disappears, everything is gone.
| yamrzou wrote:
| Does anyone have an idea about the infrastructure requirements
| and the cost of running an instance with the size of
| mastodon.technology?
| INTPenis wrote:
| I run an instance of some ~450 users, ~50 active, on a managed
| k8s cluster and it's costing me ~200usd/month. So I'm actually
| moving to my own DC where I get more than twice the resources
| for less than half the price.
|
| If you have DC and power sponsored you can get real far.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| The fundamental problem here is monetization, and the perfect
| solution is ads. Apparently this was discussed and rejected
| because people would instantly move to another server[1].
|
| Not so. Ads on twitter don't bother me much, and ads on a
| mastodon server would give me some confidence that the server
| would stick around, and not beg me for money.
|
| Monetization with ads would also give people an incentive to
| market their server.
|
| [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8913
| smoldesu wrote:
| If you start posting promoted content on a Mastodon server,
| many instances will immediately defederate with you and/or add
| you to Fediblock. It's fine if that's something you want to do,
| and there's nothing in the protocol that stops you from doing
| so, but everyone else will stop "being your friend" so-to-
| speak. That's probably why most people wanted to leave.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| I'm talking about showing ads on the website, which is what's
| discussed in the github issue I linked, not pushing ads to
| federated instances.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Oh, then I guess I don't really see what the problem is.
| It's a platform that lets you move your account freely, of
| course people are going to leave if you start smearing shit
| on the walls.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| As you know, you see ads everywhere outside, and on many
| websites, including this one. If this genuinely feels
| like "shit smeared on a wall" to you, you really need to
| seek help.
| Pxtl wrote:
| Fundamentally I've always been uncomfortable with the fact that
| Fediverse nodes aren't interchangeable in some critical ways -
| that your identity is tied to a single node, not the aggregate
| whole. This highlights why.
|
| Having nodes control moderation and the like on traffic that
| originates in and flows through their node makes sense. Having
| your identity tied to a node has always seemed wrong to me.
|
| edit: and to Ash, best wishes in taking care of your family in
| this difficult time. I imagine that giving up on your admin
| volunteer role was a very difficult decision but you did the
| right thing.
| preseinger wrote:
| This is predictable. A Mastodon instance, last I checked,
| involved installing a constellation of a half-dozen databases and
| services. That's insane. It should be a single binary.
| andreyk wrote:
| As per my comment in reply to monkin, I keep wondering why there
| isn't an open source website that makes it (almost) as easy to
| setup a fediverse instance as it is to create a Discord or a
| subreddit. Surely it's possible for a service to have a nice
| frontend UI for easy administration by non-technical users, while
| at the backend dealing with the technical API calls to cloud
| providers to make it all happen?
|
| This sort of website would be incredibly light weight (just API
| calls, no data storage), and the users would not be tied down to
| it; as long as they retain ownership of the login credentials to
| whatever cloud provider they choose, even if this front end shuts
| down the fediverse instance won't. And if it's open source, it
| would be easy to migrate to another such 'frontend management'
| website.
|
| I have thought about this quite a bit, and it seems like a great
| idea - is there something I am missing (aside from it perhaps
| being nontrivial to set up a Fediverse instance via API calls to
| cloud providers)?
|
| Of course, a clear issue is that there would still be (small)
| ongoing costs even for tiny instances, so it would not be the
| same as Discord or reddit in terms of having a 'free tier'. But
| the pitch of a 'personalized social media website' seems like a
| pretty cool idea and i'd be willing to pay a bit to try it out.
| mariusor wrote:
| It doesn't fully match your requirements, but an easy way to
| setup a mastodon instance is https://masto.host/ Does that
| help?
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