
Mastodon 2.5 released - valeg
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2018/09/mastodon-2.5-released/
======
wdewind
The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other
federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network
instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the
same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the
face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor.

For instance, the solution to content moderation and harassment is:

> “Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself.
> Thanks to the network’s spread out and independent nature there are more
> moderators who you can approach for personal help, and servers with strict
> codes of conduct.”

The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which
translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction
is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it
isn't corruptible.

As a libertarian this is really attractive to me, but in our current system,
politically, it's completely infeasible and more than that just a little
actively not wanted. People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a
larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy
instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a
pain in the ass.

I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to
really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to
be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort
into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter
already.

Please: CMV.

~~~
Crespyl
I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated
(as opposed to distributed) system, is _not_ to have every single user run and
administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select
from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers.

> People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it
> for them.

I think people mostly want a _smaller_ power to do it for them, or at least a
"smaller than The Platform, or The Government". In the case of Mastodon, I can
find a smaller instance with a handful of moderators who I trust, and let them
curate that instance. If I later find that they have abused that trust I can
disassociate with them and move to a different instance, and all of my
contacts or the general public on other instances remain unaffected.

If a user doesn't want to go to the effort of finding a specific instance that
suits their desires for moderator activity, they can easily set up on one of
the biggest instances (much the way one can easily set up a gmail account),
while the design of the system still preserves their freedom to move to
another instance if they later decide to do so (as I can choose to set up a
yahoo or fastmail account, or even run my own server).

The basic experience for the average user can be just as moderated (well or
poorly, by as many or as few people) as Twitter is, if a big instance chooses
to do so, and the freedom of users is still preserved in a way that Twitter or
Facebook cannot.

~~~
wdewind
> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated
> (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and
> administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select
> from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers.

This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for
electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to
the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales.

> I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a
> "smaller than The Platform, or The Government".

People want the freedom of small networks while gaining the moderation
protection of larger ones. People's beliefs about this are largely incoherent
imo. That being said I'm broadly against heavy handed moderation, and so I'm
happy to see it being solved by fragmenting the community rather than
enforcing undesirable norms across it.

~~~
hannasanarion
> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for
> electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back
> to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales.

I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate
such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system?

The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just
like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies
maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.

The main difference is that, if you want something smaller and less
overbearing, it's a lot cheaper to move from mastodon.social to some small
instance than it is to move from California to Vermont.

~~~
wdewind
> I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to
> dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system?

One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of
things.

> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just
> like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies
> maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.

The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it
turned in a _con_ federation, removing the right to leave, effectively
centralizing it under federal control) when the country was founded.

(Edit: I reversed the terms confederation and federation here, but what I mean
is that the founding of the US _removed_ sovereignty from the states.)

This is where the rubber meets the road: any decentralized system will need to
be able to answer the question "how do we [the govt, usually] forcibly remove
content from the network?" The way you answer that question will be the way
the network centralizes.

The history of true confederations (Colonial States, Personal Computing, the
Internet) is that they are temporary chaotic moments before we revert back to
the mean of centralization (United States, SaaS/FB/Gmail/centralized
communication and iphones as tracking devices, PRISM).

This is all an instance of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law).
Our culture is not confederated, and so we wont be able to build scalable
confederated systems within it.

~~~
hannasanarion
> The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it
> turned in a confederation

You have it backwards. The USA was a Confederation (a weak alliance of almost
entirely independent nations) under the Articles of _Confederation_ ,
1776-1789

Then in 1789 it became a Federation (a strong national union of autonomous but
not independent states) with the new Constitution.

In a confederation, the central government has negligible power and states can
come and go as they please. The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's
pretty much the only modern example, because confederations rarely last long.
Historical confederations include the CSA and Holy Roman Empire.

That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold (otherwise it would
be called the confediverse). Mastodon is intended to be structured as a
Federation, like the United States, Germany, or Malaysia, with a strong but
limited central power that maintains unity among the federated members, while
mostly letting them do their own thing.

~~~
wdewind
Sorry yeah, I reversed the terms, in response to this:

> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just
> like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies
> maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.

which is not true, under a federation the members do _not_ maintain
sovereignty, and this is the important point. The Colonial States gave up
their sovereignty when they became federated.

Everything else, besides the terms reversal (my bad), it seems we agree on?

> The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's pretty much the only modern
> example, because confederations rarely last long.

Exactly!

> That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold

So what are we even arguing about here? We agree decentralization wont last
long. If you're using the US as an example of a desirable "light hand"
federation I guess that's just where we agree to disagree.

------
riffic
This is a good read for anyone curious what this is all about, and contains a
roadmap for an "instance-of-one" via Masto.host:

[https://laurakalbag.com/what-is-mastodon-and-why-should-i-
us...](https://laurakalbag.com/what-is-mastodon-and-why-should-i-use-it/)

~~~
WorldMaker
I've been quite satisfied with my "instance-of-one" via Masto.host.

Mine is a much shorter domain than the average instance that I've had in my
back pocket for years, which I find is also nice for a number of interesting
small reasons (including sharing links to Mastodon statuses on places like
Slack).

I'm not sure I intend to always keep it to just myself, and I've made offers
to give accounts to friends, but so far no one has taken me up on the offer. I
definitely don't ever expect to allow public signups, though.

------
panarky
So tweets are "toots" in Mastodon.

Could it be that extinct mastodons grunted or growled instead of tooting?

I would rather bark, bleat, caw, croak, howl, quack or screech.

Toot? Nah.

Too many associations with musical fruits.

~~~
jordigh
Starting fights with other users is known as "tusking".

Having a wildly popular toot get boosted all over the place is "going woolly".

A server going down for good is an "extinction event".

[https://mastodon.social/@nolan/1522550](https://mastodon.social/@nolan/1522550)

I think it's all very cute.

------
stesch
Today I tried another software for the fediverse: pleroma.

So far the fediverse isn't for me. I don't want to join an existent instance.
I don't want to run a large project like Mastodon.

And pleroma looked about right for me. But it's currently only for insiders.
(I'm using Linux since the 1990s and have installed different news and mail
servers. Maybe my patience isn't what it used to be but I don't have any plans
on trying pleroma again soon.)

All the other projects are either in a very early stage or use technology I
trust less than C News.

~~~
WorldMaker
> I don't want to run a large project like Mastodon.

There are good options like Masto.host that will run Mastodon for you, but you
can bring your own domain. I find that a satisfying middle ground, and it's
what I use for my own instance.

------
narohi
Is there a way to make a mastodon instance for a private community where it
requires registration (& approval) like a forum, but still have the federation
between instances? (if not, is it possible to unfederate an instance?)

~~~
makomk
As I understand it, you can require users to get approval in order to register
locally, and there are at least patches out there to create a whitelist of
instances that are allowed to federate with you, but there's no way to require
users from the allowed instances to get approval before interacting with local
posts.

~~~
WorldMaker
Private Accounts (also sometimes referred to as Locked Down Accounts) require
explicit follow approvals and many federated actions are restricted only to
direct followers. It's an easy task if you are an instance admin creating all
accounts to default new accounts to Private instead Public (which is the usual
default elsewhere). Accounts can switch themselves between Private and Public
as needs change (though there are obvious caveats when switching).

------
dmix
I'd join an HN-oriented Mastadon if there was one.

~~~
EduardoBautista
For tech there is:

[https://mastodon.technology/about](https://mastodon.technology/about)

~~~
WorldMaker
toot.cafe for various reasons also has a pretty high percentage of
technologists.

[https://toot.cafe/about/more](https://toot.cafe/about/more)

------
rainbowmverse
Release #100.

------
mothsonasloth
Still not sure why they named it after an extinct Mammoth.

~~~
camjohnson26
Or named their tweets "toots". It's like they want it to fail.

~~~
riffic
> It's like they want it to fail.

This is software -- if you have a better idea create your own implementation
of the underlying protocol:

[https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/](https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/)

~~~
80386
There's already a different implementation of the protocol:
[https://pleroma.social/](https://pleroma.social/)

~~~
riffic
And a few more too such as Pixelfed and PeerTube:

[https://www.w3.org/wiki/ActivityPub](https://www.w3.org/wiki/ActivityPub)

