
Mastodon 2.0 - daveid
https://medium.com/@Gargron/mastodon-2-0-e93d9d28dbb9?
======
kemenaran
I started using Mastodon a few months ago, "just to see", and found great
people to interact to there. And these days I'm using Twitter less and less.

Looking back, I feel like the short-messages limit is fueling flaming
statements rather than good discussions. I also see how constant enabled-by-
default notifications and dark patterns made me addicted to new tweets ; on
Mastodon I feel less pressure to keep up with the feed constantly.

Also, the project grew from a few to 100+ contributors in a few weeks, and
apparently managed this transition quite smoothly. Development is ongoing at a
steady pace, including new features and major architectural changes. Congrats
to the team and contributors!

~~~
listic

        Looking back, I feel like the short-messages limit is fueling flaming statements rather than good discussions
    

Quite rarely, also condensed pieces of art:
[https://twitter.com/quietpinetrees](https://twitter.com/quietpinetrees)

~~~
kbenson
Wow, some of those are very good.

~~~
viraptor
Some more:

[https://twitter.com/MicroSFF](https://twitter.com/MicroSFF)

[https://twitter.com/ASmallFiction](https://twitter.com/ASmallFiction)

------
dethos
Started using just out of curiosity, about it being a federated system (just
like email), I also knew about the interoperability with Gnu Social and
OStatus networks, so I gave it a shot.

I launched my private instance and started from there. I can say I'm very
surprised, the system works very well, never had major problems and the
communication with people with accounts on other instances (since I'm the only
one in mine) works flawlessly.

This is how the Internet was supposed to work (not full of walled gardens).
The good thing is that we're seeing some great decentralized applications and
tools appearing recently and a renewed interest in this area, which is great.

~~~
criddell
What is it about Twitter that takes 3000 people to keep going vs something
like Mastodon? Is Mastodon missing something major that Twitter has? Is it
just about scale?

~~~
michael_storm
Sales, support, marketing, accounting, business ops, software ops, management,
HR. Pare those off and you might get something like Mastodon's contributor
size after adjusting for scale of user base. Although I doubt many of
Mastodon's contributors are full time, so a comparison is difficult.

~~~
criddell
So Twitter is big because it's big?

~~~
michael_storm
I don’t follow. Twitter is big because of all the things I just listed.

~~~
gipp
You just listed its components, the question was about why Twitter _needs_
those things but Mastodon does not.

~~~
michael_storm
Because Twitter is a for-profit business, whereas Mastodon is not.

~~~
criddell
And they are up to around $2 billion in losses so far, right?

It sounds like they would be better off just being a Mastodon node.

------
jochung
Decentralization is just an affirmation until they fix the network lock in
problem. You're still married to whatever instance you sign up with. The admin
limits who you can federate with, and if the policy changes, it requires you
to rebuild from scratch if you want to move.

That's what's keeping platforms like Twitter on top even though many of its
prolific users now sound more like an abused spouse than anything else.

I still think the vast majority of this concern over abuse is a red herring
though. People just don't like it when their curated bubble is pierced by
information that contradicts it, and they confuse being corrected with
persecution and social status games.

~~~
paulgb
How hard would it be to start a one-user instance so that I control my
identity and then using federation to communicate with other users? The
willingness of other admins to federate with me would be the limiting factor,
right?

~~~
nolanl
Mastodon has a single-user instance mode:
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8392ddbf87f5522c4...](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8392ddbf87f5522c445573c50e4f21d690172bc0/.env.production.sample#L47-L48)

Most instances would federate with you immediately since they're on a
blacklist model, but some instances (such as awoo.space) operate on a
whitelist, meaning they'd have to vet you first.

~~~
cdubzzz
I’m sure I can dig this up at some point, but just in case anyone knows off
hand - can a single user instance run well enough on a small (1 cpu, 512mb
ram) VPS running a few other lightweight services?

~~~
pfg
One CPU would be fine with just one user, but that's not enough RAM. I would
consider 2GB the bare minimum, with one app server instance and one background
worker process (sidekiq) running.

~~~
librexpr
hugogameiro seemed to say otherwise a month ago[0]. According to his post, it
takes <1GB of RAM. Have things changed since then?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213203](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15213203)

~~~
pfg
It would probably be possible to run the app server and background worker with
about 1 GB of RAM. You might have to restart the workers daily to avoid OOMs
(ruby/rails/puma will leak memory, you'll just accept that at some point), but
that's more or less acceptable.

That still leaves postgres, redis, your web server and all other system
processes. Fitting those on the same server with a total of 1 GB of RAM
available is a very, very tight fit. You will probably get OOMs regularly, and
upgrading Mastodon, doing backups and things like that will be painful
(building assets, for example, tends to eat a lot of memory).

hugogameiro, from what I understand, runs a lot of mastodon instances on
shared infrastructure. That eliminates a lot of that overhead and if you look
at just the instance-specific processes, 1 GB seems realistic. If you have
existing infrastructure (i.e. something like postgres, redis, nginx) and can
allocate about 1 GB of RAM to Mastodon, or use something like a Heroku 2x
dyno, where these components are separated as well, that might work.
Otherwise, I'd opt for 2 GB of RAM.

~~~
cdubzzz
So I decided to test this out on a 1CPU/512M DO droplet, just for fun.

I did indeed hit OOM during the setup (`bundle install` and `yarn` steps).
After the first one I added a 1G swap and made it all the way through the
1.6.1 install (although the webpack precompile step damn near used up the
whole swap!). Anyway 1.6.1 idles around 600M without any attempt to optimize.

I next tested an upgrade from 1.6.1 to 2.0.0 and was able to get it done (with
the precompile again cutting it close - it hit 1015M of the swap, hah!). No
change in memory usage, perhaps a bit more even.

Off topic - the install process was easy enough but seems like it could really
do well to be (much) more automated. Do you know if anyone is working towards
this? I suppose that is what Docker is for...

------
paule89
So as far as my simple mind understands, mastodon is a Twitter alternative.
But without the adds, true timeconsistent Timeline, without annoying have you
seen this tweet yet algorithms and simply working.

But the problem is that it is a social network, that depends on your social
network and its embrace of mastodon.

Am i right?

~~~
mxuribe
Almost, yeah.

Mastodon, and conceptually others like Gnu Social, are twitter-like
alternatives, but that's not fairly telling the full story of their
capabilities. These platforms bring with them decentralization benefits like
classic email does. Remember when so many people's email addresses were not
something like @gmail.com or @hotmail.com? When they used their own domain
names (either personal, or for their organization, etc.), such as
joe@whatever.net, or jane@something .org, and lived on their own servers,
though could still interact - that is, email - people from other domains,
servers? Mastodon - and again others like Gnu Social - can, and in fact
__SHOULD __live on separate servers and domains...though still allow for
interaction. This is the bigger benefit, and personally, i believe what makes
mastodon and other similar platforms pretty cool.

Now, the benefit of decentralization above may not be compelling enough for
someone on a personal basis to set up/manage their own server...and for that,
there certainly are several "largish" mastodon servers where you could create
your own account...and STILL interact with folks on other servers, etc.

I acknowledge that i sound like a salesperson for mastodon - i assure i'm not.
I'm just a fan of decentralized platforms, and admit that mastodon's UI is
easy to use. But if you're curious, i invite you to start an account, and see
for yourself. Worse case, you can always abandon it if you really dislike it.
Visit [https://joinmastodon.org/](https://joinmastodon.org/) and scroll down
to the part that helps you choose which instance to join...if you're stumped,
simply join the main/first one
([https://mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social))

Cheers!

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I will advocate for this software solely on the principle you have defined in
this post - it is a disruption of the hegemony of Facebook. Of course, it
could go wrong, but currently it is a 100% better choice when it comes to
being a part of a social network and simultaneously not having your life
creepily vacuumed up by Big Brother.

------
orthecreedence
Question for users of mastodon:

Given the flagship's stances on free speech
([https://mastodon.social/about/more](https://mastodon.social/about/more)), if
I am a user on the flagship instance (we'll call it A) and I want to follow an
account on another server (let's call it B) that posts content that wouldn't
be allowed on A, would my act of following that user on B pull the content to
A? And would that content be removed? or does it only get removed if it is
post to A in the first place?

My concern is that users on the flagship instance would only see a curated
feed of the things they follow, even if following content on server that don't
have such strict content policies.

~~~
pfg
I'm not entirely sure if mastodon.social has published any policy clarifying
how and under what circumstances they apply instance bans. There are two ways
administrators can block other instances on Mastodon:

Silence: Posts from users of these instances are only visible to users
following that user directly, but not in public timelines.

Suspend: All posts from users of these instances are always removed, even if
you follow them directly.

I would suspect that most admins stick with the first option for almost all
bans. That said, users who are concerned about this should stick to instances
with a broad interpretation of free speech.

------
heroprotagonist
I tried to use this a couple of times, but had a difficult time choosing a
community. They seemed to mostly appear the same, so I chose based on activity
and uptime. But apparently those instances were largely in languages I didn't
understand. The "filter out these languages" improved it a bit, if I go
through and check every box except english (slightly unintuitive, there, as
most people will know few languages and want to select what they know instead
of what they do not know) though not completely. It seems to work better with
'local' than with 'federated' results, which can mean cutting you off from the
global community if you limit yourself to local.

I wouldn't mind seeing a guide to various popular communities to choose what
to pick.

~~~
mintplant
Something like [https://instances.social](https://instances.social)?

~~~
heroprotagonist
That's pretty nice. I remember using it before, but maybe my selections were
better this time. Thanks! Though, if you filter for 'English' it still gives
second result with description "Une instance francaise...'

Also, I found a solution for the language issue, by adding a regex filter:

    
    
        .*[^\u0000-\u007F].*
    

It may be over-filtering a little, I am not sure. But better to filter too
much than not enough, I guess.

------
willvarfar
I'm very curious, what kind of communities and subjects have embraced
Mastodon?

A while back there was a lot of noise about how it was a popular place with
those uncomfortable topics that twitter had banned:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15053064)

I clicked gingerly on the links to communities at the bottom of the article -
octodon.social, social.tchncs.de, mastodon.art, mstdn.io, mastodon.technology,
mastodon.rocks - and many of them have a live feed of posts.

I've gotta confess I couldn't quite tell what communities there were, but I'm
not an insider and I don't know how to navigate it.

~~~
Kihashi
Many of the instances are organized around a particular community. For
example, toot.cat is for "cats and the people that love them". witches.town is
"made to provide a nice place on Mastodon for queer, feminists, anarchists and
stuff as well as their sympathizers."

However, as you'd expect, you might not talk strictly about cats on toot.cat,
but you'd be talking with other cat lovers. It might be difficult to discern
the community from the local timelines. Also, some of the ones that you
mention are just general social instances.

Each instance has an about page that you can look at to get a better idea of
what it is organized around. [1]

[1]: [https://mastodon.art/about](https://mastodon.art/about)

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Something important to note is that though your local instance is often
closest to you, all of the instances talk and you have access to the entire
network (or nearly all of it) from any instance.

------
sdrothrock
Just joined out of curiosity
([https://mstd.tokyo/@scott](https://mstd.tokyo/@scott)) and I'm pretty
impressed by how smoothly things have gone... but I'm also a bit disappointed
by how it handles federation.

If I try searching for tags or topics, I generally come up with zero results
-- I'm never quite sure if it's because they don't exist on the instance I
joined on or whether there just aren't enough users to have that tag/topic out
there in the federation.

Discoverability seems very, very low out of the box and that seems like the
one thing that would keep me from staying on Mastodon.

Another issue I ran into was that after I tooted a few times, I started
wondering if I'd chosen a "bad" server (low activity) and started looking for
ways to move my account to another server -- it feels like a waste to go and
start up another account and leave my toots behind. :/

I really wish it were possible to just browse other instances' public feeds.
For example, I'd love to see some stuff from mastodon.art, but I can't yet
figure out a way to just browse over there short of making another account.

~~~
JD557
>Another issue I ran into was that after I tooted a few times, I started
wondering if I'd chosen a "bad" server (low activity) and started looking for
ways to move my account to another server

Account migration is still the top issue on GitHub. I was a bit disappointed
when I saw that they announced 2.0 without it.

------
styfle
Would it be possible to write a service that connects twitter into a mastodon
instance so that mastodon users can follow twitter users? I’m thiking outloud
here but besides scale, are there any other drawbacks?

~~~
mxuribe
The original creator of mastodon has stated his preference for leaving this
out of the core of mastodon:
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/3888)

...But by the virtue of mastodon being only one open source platform that
works on the overall federated universe and employs the OStatus protocol,
there isn't anything stopping such a service as you described from being
built...well, except for twitter eventually deciding to block access to their
platform...but i'd guess that would turn the federated universe into a sort of
social network martyr.

Anyway, sorry i digress...To answer your question a bit more concretely, there
are options for what you asked about:

* [https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter](https://github.com/halcy/MastodonToTwitter)

* [https://medium.com/@pimterry/sync-your-mastodon-back-to-twit...](https://medium.com/@pimterry/sync-your-mastodon-back-to-twitter-3c72f2bc8626)

I'm sure there are more options; try googling. Cheers!

------
nstart
Here's a quick question I have about Mastodon instances. Most instances I
visit are hidden behind a sign up home page. Is this default? How does this
encourage more people to interact? Or is that the point? Happy if anyone can
just point me in the right direction

~~~
librexpr
On the about page of an instance[0], if you scroll down, there's "a look
inside" of the federated timeline. If you know a username, you can go directly
to their page[1]. You can find the username of the admin on the about/more
page[2].

These are sample links to mastodon.social:

[0] [https://mastodon.social/about](https://mastodon.social/about)

[1] [https://mastodon.social/@Gargron](https://mastodon.social/@Gargron)

[2] [https://mastodon.social/about/more](https://mastodon.social/about/more)

~~~
rogerbraun
sadly, the federated timeline is close to useless. I don't understand why it
isn't the public timeline that's exposed.

------
CoolGuySteve
Can Mastodon work as an isolated server on a corporate network without phoning
home?

We're looking for a Slack alternative (edit: with channels). Regulations
prevent us from using external SaaS products.

~~~
daveid
Mastodon has no home to phone to. You only host your own user's data and the
data they request by e.g. following users on other instances. If your users
don't follow anyone on the outside, nothing will leave your instance.

~~~
actuallyalys
To elaborate, Mastodon.social is only a de facto home, nothing in the code
privileges that instance over others.

------
zanedb
Mastodon seems very interesting, but I have one significant issue with it.

If every instance is decentralized, how can you be sure the instance you use
is actually running the Mastodon code? How can you be sure it hasn't been
modified to collect user credentials, for example?

Is there some sort of signature verification for Mastodon instances?

~~~
detaro
You can't. (and given that it's using open protocols, not forcing everyone to
run the same software is part of the design)

That said, what "user credentials" would an instance collect? The only people
logging into it would be user registered at this instance, "capturing" that
makes no sense.

The security model is very much like the one of e-mail: To protect your data,
you have to trust your provider, and for communications both the senders and
the receivers server have to be trusted to handle the communication contents
as expected.

------
disease
How hard would it be to allow users on a server to sell their own personal
data from a federated social network with both the server admin and some
central authority taking a cut?

I feel safe in saying that users being able to sell their own data for their
profit, instead of Facebook's, would get people to jump ship.

~~~
mxuribe
Yours is a very novel, clever idea! Being a fan of decentralized platforms, i
sort of hope that these platforms get their UI, set, etc. designed in so
simple a way in the future, as to allow (non-techies) to manage their own
future...but what i forget to think about is not the "how", but the
"why"...Your idea certainly offers a good motivator for enticing people to hop
on the decentralization train, and legitimately be in control of their own
data. Thanks for sharing!!

~~~
disease
Thanks, but there's nothing novel about it. It's a recurring theme in
technology (computing in particular) where something is invented, delivers
short-term profit to a small group of people, and then becomes standardized in
some way that allows a greater, long-term benefit to a broader audience. I'm
sure some economist somewhere has even come up with a clever name for this.

Obviously the model I describe will not generate Facebook-scale wealth for any
individual player, but I believe there is still good money to be made in
addition to the positive externalities that come from standardization and
decentralization.

------
natural219
I'm the one who wrote this piece in April outlining Mastodon/GNU Social's core
problem with identity portability[1]. I'm sad to see the development team has
decided to focus on emojis and fancy features while kicking the society-
breaking problem of federated moderation down the road. As one user put it on
the open Github issue describing the problem[2]:

> Being told right up front that you should irrevocably attach your social
> life to a server run by some rando.... is not a welcoming way to start using
> a new service.

I still think Mastodon is best-in-class in terms of UI for open social
projects, and hope the development team will consider tackling this problem.
Until then, I still cannot endorse using Mastodon/GNU Social as a platform in
its current state.

[1] [https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-
water-888c10e...](https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-
water-888c10e8abb1) [2]
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177)

~~~
natural219
(For anyone interested, I can rant a little)

This problem is easily fixable code-wise, but there's hesitation to diverge
from the standards upon which Mastodon is based, and the original standards
body behind this particular issue has long since disbanded. Other than
monkeypatching Mastodon (and potentially breaking GNU social federation), the
solution would be to re-convene a working standards body to implement a
"correct" spec for this problem. Since nobody seems willing to do that,
monkeypatching Mastodon to make an order of magnitude more users comfortable
with switching to it is probably my recommendation.

The world needs more protocol standards bodies and more engaged, engineering-
minded parliamentarians.

~~~
nolanl
It looks like the Social CG is still active, and they're working on the new
ActivityPub protocol which Mastodon 2.0 supports. Follower migration is one of
the issues they're discussing:

\-
[https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-10-11](https://www.w3.org/wiki/SocialCG/2017-10-11)

\-
[https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1](https://github.com/swicg/general/issues/1)

~~~
natural219
Oh, excellent! I can't believe I missed this!

------
pc2g4d
"Toot"

Still can't get over it.

Definition 2 on Wiktionary: "A fart; flatus."

~~~
disease
I don't like this word either. Not just the 'fart' aspect, or even the
'cutesy' aspect - I just don't like how closely this apes the word 'tweet'
from Twitter.

------
evv
I can't switch to Mastodon right now because most of my network is on Twitter.
Why hasn't somebody built an instance that lets me interact with both networks
at once?

~~~
coolsunglasses
Twitter's API is aggressively limited, so limited that third party clients
barely work.

Believe me, I've tried.

------
tschellenbach
From a tech perspective I love this project, very cool. I think it's more
likely to end up partially replacing IRC than tools like Twitter/Facebook
though.

~~~
mxuribe
I'm a big fan of open platforms like mastodon and Gnu Social, and even i
acknowledge that twitter and facebook may not be fully replaced any time
soon...But the world is big enough for all to co-exist. And, just because
mastodon won;'t replace twitter/facebook, shouldn't stop us all from
playing/working on it.

Also, my bet on what platform will (eventually) replace IRC is matrix; see
[https://matrix.org/#about](https://matrix.org/#about)

Of course, that's just my opinion.

------
aqsalose
Is there a sane solution to following local timelines of several instances?
The local timeline on my instance is quite dead, the federated timeline has so
much variance it's nearly useless.

~~~
snthd
Don't think so.

Open issue "Browse Other Instances' Public Timeline" \-
[https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1053](https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/1053)

------
afandian
I'm interested to know if anyone's using Mastodon for discussing research /
scholarly publications. Equivalent of people sharing / discussing articles on
Twitter.

~~~
Jtsummers
[https://mathstodon.xyz/](https://mathstodon.xyz/)

Is geared towards math topics. That made the rounds here earlier this year.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14564624](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14564624)

------
BadassFractal
How do I browse the different instances out there to find the ones I might
want to join?

~~~
mxuribe
Visit [https://instances.social/](https://instances.social/)

You can walk through the "help wizard", or click "list" link in topnav to see
all of the known instances.

EDIT: I failed to mention, that you should not feel like joining one instance
excludes you from the greater federation of networks...you can join one
instance and follow people from anywhere else. And, if you begin to dislike
the instance that you joined, simply move to another one...or even better -
though a tad more work for you - set up your own personal instance, do
whatever you want, and still be able to follow anyone on any other instance.

------
kzrdude
(About the page design) I don't know what medium is doing. They have bars both
along the top and bottom of their page, which cramps reading. Instant reader
mode click to resolve that, which shouldn't really be needed on medium.

~~~
heroprotagonist
It's kind of curious that they posted this on Medium instead of some Mastodon
site.

~~~
daveid
Mastodon is a microblogging platform. This does not fit into the format.

~~~
Deimorz
It shouldn't be posted on _Mastodon itself_ , but they should just set up a
simple static blog somewhere. Medium is the opposite of Mastodon in so many
ways (centralized, heavy data-collection, etc.) that it really makes no sense
for them to be using it as their official method of making announcements.

------
dorfsmay
I'm confused about identity in mastodon. Your identity is based on which
server you use? So if you change server within the federation you are
essentially a different person?

~~~
ProfessorLayton
Think of it like email identities, but applied to twitter

john@ google dot com can be a different person than john@ yahoo dot com

~~~
dorfsmay
But if you owned @example.com, you could move alex@example.com from one server
to the next.

------
CaptSpify
Mastodon seems cool, but I haven't used it enough yet. Does anyone have a
client that they would recommend? Preferably a terminal-client?

~~~
rainbowmverse
This came up on a search, but I don't know if it's any good:
[https://github.com/ihabunek/toot](https://github.com/ihabunek/toot)

~~~
CaptSpify
Yeah, I've seen a few others via searching around, but I haven't heard any
reviews or anything. Thanks

~~~
rainbowmverse
I've had good luck treating stars and forks on GitHub as reviews. It means it
served someone's needs, so it's probably worth trying.

------
jeena
The only meaningfull way to use it is with your own domain so you can change
the hosters easyly without loosing your whole network of followers/friends.
You can self host for sure but it would be nice to be able to just use your
domain with one of the hosters for starters, is there such a possibility?

------
mvdwoord
Ah, mastodon again, wonder how it is going. Logs in..

Your home timeline is empty! Visit the public timeline or use search to get
started and meet other users.

Double checks, yes following people, checks again... closes tab, goes back to
somewhere else.

~~~
fenwick67
This happens if you don't log in for a while, the server stops updating your
timeline for you, and it will be empty when you first log in. If you wait a
few minutes it should populate again.

