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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I deployed and have been maintaining a very small Mastodon server (~10 active users) for several years now and I can say that at my scale it is not difficult (for someone with modest technical abilities but no professional sysadmin experience). Sure if your instance is as large as Mastodon.technology and you are the only admin doing it as a hobby/side-gig then things can get rough.
Regarding spam, there is some (seemingly inevitable in any community involving humans). But frankly Mastodon, right from the beginning, focused heavily on Moderation tools. Figuratively speaking, no expense has been spared to make it easy and convenient to block bad actors (or instances) from your account (or your whole instance).
The biggest thing is that expectations are different. Mastodon doesn't do much (or rather ActivityPub doesn't do much - there are many ActivityPub implementations), though there's at least a less manual way of handling federation than having to e-mail people and get added to their config by hand.
With USENET people expected to see every posts in the newsgroups they were subscribed to, and a lot of people would complain loudly if anything was missing. With a network like this nobody expects to read everything. At the same time receiving everything is easier (still) - if you federate with a couple major endpoints you get most stuff. There will be challenges with this as the network grows but I spent too much time ensuring we got messages from newsgroup X within Y hours (less was unfeasible, as there were still sites exchanging on a schedule via dialup).
With respect to spam, once you accept you're not likely to see everything, things get a lot simpler and you can apply a lot more aggressive filtering.
Personally I'm working on my own ActivityPub implementation, and one of the things I've used on Twitter in the past very effectively via the Twitter API was a simple Bayesian network used to rank things to surface interesting stuff, but lots of room to apply more sophisticated machine learning there too.
Maintaining anything takes effort, so who's gonna do it for free?
Maybe there could be a variant of NNTP which allowed some amount of advertisement posts in between. Then let the maintainers keep the proceeds from those?
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.
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.
That is the number of Google accounts that didn’t go through the effort of disconnecting from / opting out of Google+. For a few years, all new accounts were automatically enrolled in Google+. It’s likely an extremely inflated number compared to the number of users that engaged with Google+ social features.
I agree with the sibling that that isn't a representative number. I think we'd want to know something related to actual participation - what's the average daily or weekly number of posts or likes or whatever equivalent is in Plus versus Facebook, Twitter, etc.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's crazy. I built an entire scraping engine just to get Reddit posts, I'm pretty sure .rss isn't documented anywhere at all, would have saved me so much work!
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.
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.
As I said, mastodon.technology announced shutdown in advance, they haven't yet shut down. So people can discuss future plans there, they don't have to move to do it.
I agree it is difficult in the situation you describe, which is not mastodon.technology's situation.
Having gone through this multiple times on both Mastodon and other social networks (Google+), not having a readily-accessible discussion record is a problem.
That last is of course now unobtainable, though there were over 700 snapshots of the community homepage saved to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, see:
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.
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.
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.
I vaguely remember Ello being mentioned as the place to go that wasn't Google+, and I see that they have now pivoted to being an artist social network. kind of interesting.
It began as a venture by a couple of graphic artists, focused on artists. It happened to have (for a few iterations) a quite clean design based on Markdown, and (with a couple of what should have been reasonably small tweaks) could have done well in the long-form text+images space (now largely owned / failed by old-school blogging engines such as Wordpress, Medium, and Substack).
The features it had, including Markdown's sections and tables was why I'd posted that particular take on G+ there. It simply presented the information better than any other readily-available platform I was using at the time.
In 2015 a bunch of trans activists and sex performers who'd been hounded off Facebook by its Real Names policy wound up on Ello, and a few people arrived from other platforms (I was at the time a refugee from G+). For about six to twelve months it was the New Hawtness, and attempted a few pivots to the space, but performed fairly poorly in doing so. My own Ello profile has a link to a set of curated posts, one section of which details various gripes and failings.
One thing Ello did do was organise as a B-Corp with a community focus. That went swimmingly until it didn't, with the first accepting VC money then being sold to a collector of such sites. The B-Corp language seems to have disappeared, along with the community principles texts. What's left is now ... a sort of vaguely art-aggregation site with an interesting history but little future so far as I can tell. It's burned virtually all its early adoptors (myself included).
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"
> 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.
But I do think it is worth pointing out there is nothing wrong with folks doing something to scratch their own itch. It does not have to be hugely popular or have a ton of users. If the sysadmins care enough to keep it running, that it literally all that matters...
>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."
It also doesn't have to be shut down entirely. It could morph into a form that doesn't work for a lot of people, but does for others (yet making meta more profitable).
I presume this Metaverse thing is that. Facebook may stop being the platform that serves every second person on earth a feed of images and text. Or stop being the place where we can communicate for free. Once profitability shifts to VR sets, virtual-asset markets and augmented advertising (or whatever markets emerge, if any)
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.
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.
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.
Great point. Not long ago, it was not commonly imagined that large nuclear reactors anywhere in the world would be on the border of moving front lines between warring armored forces. People aren't great at imagining how things can change.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
Wow that's a grim perspective. Somehow I doubt that catering to the consumerism that got us to where we are with climate change is what's going to help us fix it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Orkut was super successful and was eventually shutdown.. Meta will live on forever but facebook might well be a relic of the past. Most people don't even log into facebook anymore than a few times a year.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
> 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.
Wait, where have we heard this before? Oh right, Bitcoin and mining. It won’t be run by small time users if it catches traction. Not techies goofing around on the weekend, but when your Grandma creates an account because her friend is on there.
"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.
> 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.
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.
great list thanks for sharing. I'm just not sure making grain alcohol in the 15th century applies to a modern day Internet company listed on a public stock exchanges. But time will tell for sure.. it always does!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Referring to furries as a "perfectly cromulent lifestyle" is such a probably unintentionally fraternal salute in terms of antinormativity/cultural openess. Good vibes.
> 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.
> 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.
> You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.
That's not incompatible. You can go anywhere you want but you can get banned from place if you're an ass there is entirely sensible way for federated network to work.
More than that, it's necessary if you want any resistance to bad actors
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? This has always confused me and is part of the reason I haven't started using it, I couldn't decide on which instance to use. Why can't an account be globally unique and not tied to a specific instance? Why, as a user, do I have to deal with the low-level concept of an instance?
Is this all just a consequence of keeping user data private-ish? I understand the data has to be stored somewhere, and if user data were distributed to the entire network, it obviously wouldn't be private. Couldn't e2e + public key encryption be used to work around this somehow?
Mastodon confused me for the longest time as well. Which community do I join? If I create an account on "federatedplumbers.example" why would I interact with a community and follow people at "federatedshoelacecollectionists.example"? Shouldn't I create an account at both communities and interact with each separately? This is what we do now by having a twitter account and a facebook acount, and a etc... A twitter account doesn't ever talk to a facebook account.
Then I saw someone do something I hadn't seen before...
They made their own mastodon insance: toot.firstlastname.example and their identity was @joey@toot.firstlastname.example
Joey could make his own toot feed of social media posts that anyone at any community could subscribe to.
Joey could then subscribe to the entire community at federatedplumbers.example, or he could follow just one user: @phoebe@federatedplumbers.example. Then @monica@federatedshoelacecollectionists.example could follow @joey@firstlastname.example and so on.
It doesn't matter where you start an account. You can join a community that you really like or start from scratch with your own instance and go and make friends in other communities. The real advantage with starting your own is that you have control over your content and aren't in danger of having your account shut down if a community decides it can no longer maintain the server.
because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then becomes why can't you change your name? and it has mainly to do with avoiding name conflicts in administratively isolated systems.
A major problem in distributed systems is names. one solution is to do what dns did, you can have nice names but you only get to pick them under the part of the hierarchy you control. another solution is to do what git or ipfs does. nobody gets useful names but at least you don't need any sort of central name database.
mastodon went the dns/email route, which makes sense people want nice names. but now your name is stuck on your domain. perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns.
Off tangent opinion on names in a federated system.
Unfortunately mastodon adopted the twitter style "@user" but because this only make sense in the context of a single domain mastodon mainly uses the awkward form "@user@domain" I think the email/xmpp form "user@domain" would have been better, but if they felt the @ prefix was critical to the experience of a twitter like micro blog than they probably should have adopted the form "@user.domain"
It is actually a better question than I initially thought.
the question actually challenges all sorts of assumptions we make about how the internet works. in this regards it reminds me of IPFS.
And while ipfs has some very cool tech the main thing it has problems with are names. ipfs has no names, which sucks. there is a name system ipns but it does not help much.
ipfs does a publish/subscribe subsystem which I find one of the most compelling parts. it is however considered experamental and inefficient.
this did not stop me from writing a distributed video streaming system using it. which turns out to suck, no names, and, even on my local network I was getting ~ 2 minutes of lag, no one would put up with that for streaming.
By all means, enlighten us to the better one. It seems like they made a tradeoff here, and one that’s most in line with keeping everything distributed.
I don't know that I'd agree that it's a "very, very poor choice" but I can see how it would prevent Mastodon from seeing more widespread adoption. If widespread adoption isn't their goal, then it really doesn't matter though, and as you said, they made a tradeoff. I can definitely see the benefits of both ways of handling users.
>perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns.
ENS (https://ens.domains/) solves this problem rather elegantly. A single source of truth that is decentralized so any app can use it without trusting anyone. It wasn't around when Mastadon was being built unfortunately but is useful for developers of new apps and protocols.
Can you elaborate on how it doesn't? It ticks all of the boxes from your message.
Only the top level namespaces require a purchase. Names for services (e.g. james.mastadon.eth) are free. A live example of this is Coinbase which gives users (name).cb.id for free. Once your service claims a namespace you have full control over it.
From a technical point of view because ActivityPub is based in HTTP and other instances need to know what endpoint to talk to.
There is already support for basic migration of followers but it would be nice to see fully instance-independant accounts. Probably something based on cryptography so your account is a key and you can publish from any server. However a protocol like this would be a lot more complicated than ActivityPub.
It's because of the sybil problem. If accounts are globally unique, then a bad actor can register as many accounts as they want, and can do things like e.g. reserve other people's usernames and charge real money to have them unreserved.
I just looked into SSB and I really like the concept. It seems much more elegant than Mastodon. Why is Mastodon/the Fediverse so much more popular (or is it?)? What are the advantages of federation over total decentralization? I suppose one disadvantage of total decentralization is the need for ‘fat clients’, as another commenter pointed out.
There's not one network with mastodon. Depending on which node you start in, you can get different graphs (from what I remember, mostly due to differences in value between valuing free speech vs preventing hate speech).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Insert any modern chat app and random user can drop a screenshot there trivally, do some basic text formatting, and paste code in nicely colored blob of text, all from comfort of single login in a browser. And now even jump to voice chat or video conference directly from it.
They can also look at what they missed in channel by just scrolling up. Sending files just worked. You just got notifications without extra fuckery. Hell, you get digest with conversations you miss.
That's why modern closed down chat ecosystems won. Coz it's easy for "normies" to use.
Let's take other example, XMPP. It had all that but in network of XEPs that some clients/servers implemented, some not, some just not very well, and some being fucky to config. It wasn't just "login here and get every feature" like it is in modern chat clients.
It had it's one shining moment where both facebook and google offered XMPP way into their garden so you could have connectivity across federation and just have a single contact list but that didn't matter to non-nerds that just used facebook/google talk so once they decided to close their gardens any benefit of xmpp faded away.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
> "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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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 ?
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.
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 10,000€ 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.
Well, it was true decade, maybe two ago. Stuff got faster and therefore cheaper too.
Server written in reasonably fast software on $10 (well, probably some extra bux in storage if community is image-heavy) VPS can reasonably serve tens of thousands of users in typical forum/blog/hn-esque format. Mastodon isn't but I don't doubt someone would rewrite it in something faster if there was a need for it.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Fully p2p doesn't really work well either. For a fully p2p network, nodes will have to hold the entire data.
Now first storage space taken will be ridiculous, and then you will be hosting content you don't want to host because it could be straight up illegal in your country.
Look at any crypto-blockchain and count how many full-nodes vs thin-nodes are running in networks.
Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.
Yeah, and there will be people that will just throw their porn collection there, hogging space on other people's drives for no good reason.
There is an option of dividing it between "publisher" (source) and "cachers" (caching whatever is recent and popular) but that only helps a little bit.
> Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.
Over 2 decades of pirating that has only been a problem for obscure and old stuff.
I don't see it being a problem in social network sense; you publish your stuff, if there is nobody wanting to look at it, seeds 1, leeches 0. Moment there is interest it propagates. It is of course problem if you want to see something archival that author is no longer in the network tho.
> Over 2 decades of pirating that has only been a problem for obscure and old stuff.
It's a common problem for old stuff like you said, very new stuff with specific formats. It's an issue for new stuff because it often doesn't have enough starting seeds, and people leaving as soon as they're done watching/downloading doesn't help the situation. Before I've discovered usenet this was a very common issue for me.
Then there is specific file formats like chunky movie rips with Dolby Vision + Dolby Atmos + Dolby Yet Another Audio Format + all of that again in 5 languages. People will often choose a different release to download, and that leads to fewer seeds.
I know a group of people on a popular torrent tracker that just downloading everything and seed forever. They do entirely for free. Those petabytes will probably rot once they...die.
edit: Scratch that, a more fleshed out and popular protocol that implements this P2P concept is Scuttlebutt: www.http://scuttlebutt.nz/
The most user friendly and refined client I’ve found that implements this protocol is Planetary: https://www.planetary.social/
Funny, I've discovered scuttlebutt, that you're talking about, while I was reading about cluster membership and fault detection protocol. I was so confused of how all of this chat rooms have to do with what I was reading about just a minute ago.
Your comment piqued my interest, but I didn't find the android (Manyverse) or desktop (Patchwork) apps to be user friendly. The UIs had a few UX oddities and unless you are convinced to join by others who are already using it, the social network is barren. Even trying to chain my from the most active people (last posts months ago) through their follower and following lists didn't fix my impression of it being a historical ledger.
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?
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.
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.
I think you don't understand that 10,000 tweets isn't 10,000 inserts. It's not enough to just write tweet, you need to fan-out writes to every user's feed. It's also not batched into neat transactions like your batch jobs.
You don't need to fan out writes to feeds. Users subscribe to other users, not tweets. You can attempt to send out the notification to subscribed users, and if it fails, that's fine. You don't need to record notification status. Have a worker that records (in the db) the last tweet id it's processed, and just regularly joins N new tweets to authors to subscribers and attempts to send. You can play with how that query works to limit total work done in a chunk rather than N new tweets (in case of someone with many subscribers), but the idea is straightforward.
You can easily batch writes into neat transactions: make a queue, have your POST handler write (row, callback) onto the queue and await the callback. Have the queue reader grab a chunk, push it to the db in batch, and execute all of the callbacks on commit. The callbacks return a 200 to the client, or 500 if the commit failed. This can all happen fast enough to be done in "real time" (however fast you want your queue worker to flush batches).
You can do all of this in a couple dozen lines of code with something like Scala/ZIO.
Computationally, it is totally doable. The biggest constraint is the cost of storage.
I've worked in a social network with feeds. Feeds are hard. Both fan-out on write vs fan-in on read both have upsides and downsides. Either way, it's "cheap" problem to solve in a couple of dozen lines of code.
When I said that you can't batch, I meant that each tweet will be at least one transaction. Async write with batching like you suggested will have a horrible user-experience, also your client often is a mobile device or browser - how do you deliver a callback from server there?
Nah, how many inserts your laptop can make and how many tweets created in a unit of time are two irrelevant metrics.
> how do you deliver a callback from server there?
You don't. The callback is on the server before it ever responds to the request. The client sees a synchronous response with a delay of a few extra milliseconds.
Here, I slapped this together to demonstrate the technique[0]
Which processes up to 8k requests at a time, waiting up to 10 ms for a batch.
The worker does a bulk db insert, and completes the promises with the generated ids.
Similar techniques should work on read batching, but I haven't tried that. You can also speed that up some more with the COPY protocol, but IIRC you need to be more careful about escaping/SQL injection. The example I wrote uses prepared statements/parameter binding.
On my 6 year old mid-range desktop (this CPU[1] and this disk[2]) this program can process ~30k `create`s per second. For about $1500, I could buy a new computer with a Ryzen 9 7950 with 4x the core count/8x the thread count and 2x the single-threaded performance, so around ~10x more processing power, 128 GB of RAM, and a Samsung 980 Pro SSD, which can do 1M Write IOPS (25x more than my SSD) or 5GB/s sequential writes (10x more). So a $1500 computer with a single disk should be able to do around 300k/s. PCIe gen 5 is now coming out, which will allow for another doubling of disk performance.
128GB of RAM means you can keep at least 100M rows worth of index in memory. It's not that expensive (under $10k) to build a server with 1TB of RAM.
Totally feasible for a hobbyist to do without tons of tricky optimization (the code I posted is purely functional Scala!); people spend $20k on a jetski or $80k on a truck. Like I said, the most expensive part is going to be the storage, but you could do something like only store the most recent 1000 tweets per person, and charge $10 to bump that up to the most recent 10 million tweets or something. You'd come out at a substantial profit with that model if you got a few thousand takers. Similarly you could charge to let someone follow more than a few thousand people so you could pay for a read replica or two.
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
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.
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.
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.
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”.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
"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
> 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.
So is the answer that I'm misunderstanding, or is the answer that I'm understanding correctly. Are the ramifications that I highlighted true in either case, or false?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
- 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.
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
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.
To be clear, when you move accounts, your old server will notify the servers of all the people who follow you such that they will silently be updated to following your new account. This is not something you can do yourself at all; you can contact all of those people and tell them about your new account, but then they'd have to take action to follow it.
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
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.
I always wondered when twitter is ultimately shuttered if they will hand off (at least all the public facing) tweet to some place like the the library of congress for historical purposes.
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.
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.
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)
I think the project instances exist so people will at least get on board, try it, figure it out, and move on to a more suitable instance rather than abandon the whole thing entirely. The alternative is losing lots of potential users at the front door.
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.
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.
> 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.
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""
> End-to-end encryption doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data.
It's literally the opposite. E2EE means only the participating parties can decrypt the messages.
> In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account.
TLS is not designed for e2ee, it's designed to protect traffic in the client server model. This is referred to as in-transit encryption. SSL got traction mostly due to e-commerce.
> I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here.
Prior to computers, people pre-shared their symmetric secret keys only with those they trusted, precisely to make their messages secure from spies, couriers etc. This is e2ee.
You are right that "you have to trust our almighty server" is commonplace, but they absolutely do not have to. In 1991 came PGP which let you have e2ee over email (even if your peer is offline). Signal, Matrix etc use more advanced protocols to provide even more security and useful features. Even whatsapp and telegram have e2ee in most ways, although they have been criticized for not satisfying all criteria.
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.
> 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 ?
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.
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.
That too is easily modified. Mastodon hardcodes the value a few places, or at least used to. Pleroma has config settings to separately enforce a local limit on how much you're allowed to write, and a hard limit above which it will drop remote posts. Problem is the latter - any instances which increases the post length too much will need to consider that they'll effectively make federation unreliable for their users because most other instances will have a hard limit above which they'll drop or truncate posts.
But overall it's easy to iterate on this, and you can try things on your own instance or your own "corner" of likeminded instances while still be able to interoperate on most things.
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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.
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.
> 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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I don't know how Wordpress or NextCloud uses it, but for my own use I'm considering building a comment system for my sites around in, on the basis that having comments about my posts exposed to the fediverse seems like a good way of increasing reach.
(there's the challenge of length; there's no problem upping the post-length for comments etc., but many instances will reject them, so you do face the issue of having to replace the body of longer comments with a link to a page, which is sub-optimal but doable)
Wordpress have same problem of being slow POS that in addition needs to be constantly updated for security issues.
Hell, we even got one of our clients (we just provided hosting for some of their stuff) getting half-hacked while setting it up (they were not exactly the developer type). Half-hacked because we required app-to-internet traffic to be ran by proxy so the final payload didn't get downloaded on the server, hilariously enough.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GP clearly and convincingly explained how there was nothing personal about their comments. You, OTOH, bring in your mechanic and his wife... And then get fucking hostile in response to a calmly reasoned explanation.
So no, it's definitely you who are bringing the personal drama here. To the extent that one can't help wondering, mr Random-string-of-letters-and-numbers, whether you are that hostile solo developer.
No, it's not about that. This developer created a fake website claiming to represent the whole Fediverse, à la https://joinmastodon.org/. His version recommends the following instances, in order, with the message "Browse a small sample of Fediverse servers that are welcoming to newcomers below.":
• Literal Neo-Nazi site. Defederated by nearly all of Fedi because they are literal, card-carrying Nazis.
• Transphobia-even-if-it-means-misogyny site run by his wife. Defederated by most of fedi, for harassment campaigns. Defederated from my instance for harassing a cis woman who worked at a feminist charity for, as I recall, having pronouns in her bio, which is apparently too much like solidarity for them. (There were a couple of good people on that instance, last time I checked. Well, one good person. I think she messaged me later, saying she left.)
• His personal instance that basically nobody uses. (It's too obscure to be blocked by most of Fedi, but it's blocked by most of the instances he tries to interact with; he inevitably breaks their rules.)
• shitposter.club: A kinda-okay, but not moderated to my taste, instance. Blocked by some of fedi; probably on the list because they still federate with his personal instance.
• freespeechextremist.com: A barely moderated instance that… well, I trust its sysadmin – sorry, its BOFH. And it is friendly. But it's a "free speech zone", with all that entails; there are some total arseholes there, and the only thing keeping them from causing major damage is the relentless bullying they get from the other users until they leave.
The bottom two are legitimately part of the Fediverse – albeit the shady alleyways of the Fediverse – but we've almost universally shunned the top three. This developer used SEO hacks to get his fake near the top of the search results. (Please don't link it here; we don't need to give it more SEO juice.)
He does not represent the people who make the protocols; he does not represent the people who curate the communities; he does not represent the communities; and yet he claims to, all the while decrying how mean the community is being to him.
We just want to live our lives, and use the 'net to talk to each other. If anyone's making this political, it's him.
Why is it fake just because you don't like the choice of recommended instances. Does it not make sense to recommend instances that are more open to federating with others?
made an account simply to say that when you say things like "The bottom two are legitimately part of the Fediverse – albeit the shady alleyways of the Fediverse" its really obvious how poorly you think of these other groups, such that even if they're still people using the same software for this, that because of their views they aren't "legitimate". i dont really get that, but i figure i'd say that when you lead off with They're Literal Neo Nazis, 1) people tend to not care (and if you or someone else does, dont join them, defed, mute. just let others live their own lives ffs) and 2) not all poast users are nazis even if many of them are, same with fse or spc or any other given. also as far as "no one uses his instance" idk i think 500 people is a pretty big amount to have a personal dev server.
if you want to just live your life, stop posting about how some guy who has no access to your life beyond you looking at his stuff or being shown it on fedi. just block the guy, mute instance, set up a reject, and fucking focus on something else. theres other shit to do that isnt giving a shit about some nerd on the internet that you dont like. theres so many other things in fact that i'd imagine you'd enjoy doing much more than thinking about Alex Gleason. have a good day yo.
> its really obvious how poorly you think of these other groups,
Nah, shady alleyways are great. I'm friendly acquaintances with quite a few people there, and it's legitimately the right place for them. They're just not places I'd send somebody new to the Fediverse to, for the same reason I wouldn't direct a tourist through the backstreets. Sorry if the analogy wasn't clear.
But the others? They aren't legitimate members of the community. They're not making the protocols; they're not interested in the ideals or in collaboration; and they want to hurt the people who are.
> when you lead off with They're Literal Neo Nazis
I don't know how else to describe them. What do you call somebody who puts Nazi armbands, pictures of Adolf Hitler, and the word 'Nazi' in their bio, and regularly talks about how much they want to commit genocide? People who are so aligned with Nazism that they even call themselves Nazis are not welcome. It's not just "views". They want to murder us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism
> many of them are [Nazis], same with fse or spc or any other given.
Nope, couldn't find any Nazis on SPC. There are xenophobes and self-described fascists on FSE, but I haven't seen any card-carrying Nazis – and I've already said what I have to say about that instance, anyway. If somebody there starts causing problems for the rest of Fedi, they soon discover they can't take what they dish out.
There are disagreements about basically everything else, but the Fediverse does not tolerate actual Nazis.
> stop posting about how some guy who has no access to your life
To my knowledge, this is the second thing I've written about him that wasn't to him. (The first was my previous comment in this thread.) I don't have any particular reason to rant about him – but that doesn't mean I'm going to avoid discussing him when it's relevant.
He's not a stranger to me. While he was still tolerated in them, we ran in the same circles. I trusted him enough to approve his follow request.¹ The last conversation I remember us having – before I made some followers-only posts about myself that, apparently, put me on his 'undesirables' list – was me being excited to play his upcoming video game.²
It's not a case of him being kicked out of our spaces; he removed himself from them with his antagonistic and bullying behaviour. (He even tried to force people to use his protocols by deliberately breaking compatibility; that's not how the Fediverse works.) And now he's pretending he speaks for the whole Fediverse – something none of us do – when his software isn't even compatible with Diaspora*. And he's telling people that a group of Nazis is the Fediverse's idea of "welcoming to newcomers".
If he stopped being such a prick, I'd welcome him back. Because I liked him.
---
¹: He uses Pleroma, so everything short of DMs would've shown up on his Home timeline. Unlike Mastodon's Home timeline algorithm, this would've included unlisted replies to other people's unlisted threads, and my parts of 'followers-only' conversations even where he wasn't following the other participants. So, quite a lot of access to my life, actually.
²: The video game appears abandoned, now; it's unfinished, and hasn't been worked on for over two years. Must've dropped off his list of priorities.
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.
That is what I noticed as well. The behavior of most of the people involved in these MRs were really toxic and unwelcoming whatever the reason might be.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand the question, it already supports comments. littr.me is basically a link aggregator and discussion platform that's very similar in UX to (old) reddit, hacker news and lobste.rs.
> 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).
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.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
You're not building social network then. Just a single isolated place. So obviously problems of running bigger social space won't apply as much
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Sorry, but this simply isn't true. Hasn't been ever, really.
I say this as someone who set up and scaled one of Europe's large dedicated WordPress hosting platforms. Everything, from nginx-phpfpm to varnish to scaling that horrible mess of plugins and themes your Fiverr dev delivered beyond just five req/min.
It really isn't very easy. And certainly not simple.
maybe it s not highly scalable, but WP is easy, millions of people do it. IRC is also easy to setup. Any of the mastodon/Matrix servers are not, and they dont really scale well (which is weird to me, why is it challenging to support a 100 users chat). Decentralized services should be designed to be lightweight ab inition because they are not going to run on supercomputers.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Saying it as the person in charge of developing Mastodon, probably the most likely reason more servers don't charge for access is that it's not built into the software, so it would require either customizing the code or manually sending out invites based on external payments (e.g. Patreon, some servers actually do that). I would imagine the other likely reason is that complexity of signing up as a business with your local tax office, charging the right taxes based on where the customers are located, and accounting. I do absolutely agree that paying for your account would make running the servers so much more sustainable.
I doubt that any SaaS pays taxes based on where the users are located, so the only burden is in setting up the business in the first place. In any case, projects like open collective could help to manage fiscal issues.
For smaller instances, I really have a hard time seeing tax authorities going after people because they decided to host a server and ask a total of $100-$1000 per year from a few dozen people.
Lastly, perhaps if you weren't so biased against crypto, you'd realize that this is one actual valid use case for it?
The US has complicated state-by-state rules for who has to pay sales taxes and when. Other places seem to mostly have something like VAT with varying rules. One benefit of Patreon is they handle all this for you.
One of McAfee's last scams before he died was pushing a "crypto-based social network" that was just a poorly reskinned Mastodon called Hiveway.[0] It was 100% BS and didn't even bother to turn off federation. Hilarity ensued. There's nothing stopping someone from legitimately adding crypto support to it.
I am not even talking about adding crypto into the network protocol - which I agree is not needed unless you are an ideologue. What I am saying is that smaller instances (from tens to low hundreds of users) could accept crypto for payments and use that to fund its maintenance.
Yeah, you could do it with regular payment processors as well, but with crypto you could not only avoid the fees from micropayments (layer-2 solutions already exist and allow fast and cheap transfers) but most importantly you could run these instances without dealing with bureaucracy. No taxman will come after you because you are getting a few hundred bucks per month.
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.
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.
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.
If you use a popular instances your account will show up in searches, likes and other things.
But when using an independent server, one would need to type your full username, and then try and see if such an account exists.
if you only type the display name, or username without the server address, nothing will show up.
Which is fine for chat apps like Matrix or E-Mail, but not for platforms where discoverability is important.
You know what else helps a lot? Getting in quality conversations with others, having something relevant to share with others, etc. IOW, by being social.
At this point, it seems like a feature that the system does not make it easy to be discovered.
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.
> - 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Each user runs a server process, locally or on a remote machine.
Mastodon (and similar services) would benefit greatly from (a) requiring users to own their own instances, via commoditized hosting providers, (b) one-click or few-clicks transition between hosting providers, and (c) enabling serverless-style pricing.
Requiring users to own their own instances safeguards users from admin-shutdown.
Ease of migration safeguards users from poor hosting providers.
Serverless-style pricing (e.g. pay per federated message, not by CPU) reduces the financial barrier to entry for new and lite users who are not yet fully committed users.
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.
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.
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.
The main tip for new and small instances is to use ActivityPub relays. There are curated lists in public git repos. They will make your public timeline pop, and allow your users to discover other users and instances to make real connections with.
So just allowing for personal connections will also work to federate but a lot slower.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
And you're free to pick a mastodon instance that offers the same (if that's something you cared to do). Do you also complain that it's possible for any rando can spin up their own email server and start passing out free email addresses?
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
While Mastodon.technology may be closing, Mastodon.tech is welcoming new members with the same TOS as found at Mastodon.technology. We are in communication with creator, Ash.
We've had over a year's experience running Mastodon but the Ruby platform is not resource efficient nor well suited for this purpose. We installed Pleroma for Mastodon.tech to avoid the inevitable problems Ruby created at Mastodon.technology for Ash. Pleroma is equally connected to the Fediverse.
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."
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.
Federation seems to be the way to go but current implementations seem a bit lacking from what I've seen.
If you have an account with a Mastodon server, what if the owner takes a disliking to you? What if their server shuts down and you can't migrate your account/identity?
Realistically every person should be hosting their own personal Mastodon node to at least base their account/identity around it, then consume/interact with content via federation but self-hosting isn't a system that works for "normal" people.
Maybe it already works like this (I haven't looked into their code/Mastodon at all recently) but a system where your identity is federated/shared across nodes in the same way torrents are mean that the more communities that you participate in the more "backed up" your identity is; if one node shuts down, your identity is still stored across many other nodes. Hell, it would be possible for people to run identity nodes that deal with nothing other than acting as an identity host/backup for users.
I think the PR advantage for things like Twitter is that people can go to one place: "Twitter", it's easy and you can locate all content from there. Mastodon still seems a little fragmented by comparison. We all might be tech people but I think for regular people to adopt there could be a few improvements.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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 ?
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.
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.
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
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.
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:
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:
That article has loads of assertions of personal opinions of the author and besides a glaring lack of evidence, didn't even bothering googling how the local public radio editorial policy isn't centralized. Consider that NPR does not have a radio broadcast at all. Affiliates do. Affiliates who can air any combination of content produced in house, by NPR or by other affiliates all catering to local markets. Local affiliates derive most of their funding from members but NPR is prohibited from soliciting which is why they also have corporate sponsors. The sponsors do not exert editorial control and don't even have access to affiliates who determine what goes to air.
I'm not entirely on board with the CA article myself, though I think it does make a fair case for neoliberal bias. Chomsky's made a similar case for what it's worth.
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.
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.
I disagree, ActivityPub is closely intertwined[1] with ActivityStreams[2] and expose all the actions and intents of the sender as part of the protocol.
First of all, I must clarify that I didn't truly address your initial statement, that "all" ActivityPub elements should be E2E encrypted, which is a notion that I find absurd, because it increases the complexity at least an order of magnitude and except "Create", no other activity in the specification has side effects that pass "content" between servers. In my opinion the only part of an ActivityPub request that can be sensitive and could require encryption are dereferenced objects inlined in a "Create" activity.
What I addressed with my (granted too terse answer) was that E2E communication is actually possible, but it would require one of the following options:
A "Create" Activity can wrap any type of object that has a JSON-LD document describing it (the ActivityStreams vocabulary is extensible[1]) so adding a new "E2EEncryptedMessage" object that contains all the properties required (and which are not already exposed in the existing vocabulary, eg, public keys which exist for the actors that participate in the exchange) in such a communication is possible. As long as all the information required for E2E can be encoded fully at each communication step (ie, nothing needs to be communicated off-band) everything will behave as expected for the clients that support this protocol extension.
Another option would be to piggy back on existing Object types like "Document" and encode a full E2E payload in it's "Content" to obtain a similar effect but with less expressiveness from a ActivityPub point of view. This probably needs a custom "MimeType" to accompany it so other clients can avoid processing these objects.
In conclusion, that's what I meant by having ActivityPub behave like "wire protocol", and apologies if I created confusion.
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.
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.
It is time that monetization in tech becomes and absolute given again.
I was not part of this community but I wish all the best to OP and his family.
Money solves problems and it shouldn't be considered bad to ask for a little compensation for upholding a service that thousands of people benefit from. That's the basis of anything meant to be sustainable. (I know lichess.org is an exception but tbh nobody knows for how long that's going to work out well.)
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.
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.
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)
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.
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”.
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.
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).
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.
Sorry, I wasn't precise: it's two databases (Postgres, Redis), an HTTP frontend (nginx) and specific versions of two interpreted language runtimes (Ruby, Node). The point stands.
While Mastodon can be used for small server purposes (e.g. server-of-one) it is really geared towards professional use - providing a service to thousands of users and scaling up horizontally. Looking beyond technical requirements, so many of Mastodon's features echo this -- account management, reporting, moderation. In that context, I really do not think that "uses a reverse proxy in the front" and "has a database and a cache store" is a factor.
> While Mastodon can be used for small server purposes (e.g. server-of-one) it is really geared towards professional use - providing a service to thousands of users and scaling up horizontally.
Mastodon advertises itself as being a self-hosted project.
> Your *self-hosted*, globally interconnected microblogging community
> I really do not think that "uses a reverse proxy in the front" and "has a database and a cache store" is a factor.
These things matter at scale, but the typical Mastodon instance comes nowhere near that scale.
A reverse proxy is relevant beyond O(10k) RPS; less than that, and a single process directly serving requests is more suitable. A separate database is relevant beyond O(10M) records; less than that, and any embedded DB, or, frankly, direct filesystem access with any encoding format, is more suitable. A caching layer is relevant at the next order of magnitude for both of those dimensions; less than that, and there's no need.
Mastodon should, by default, ship as a single binary, statically compiled, with no runtime language requirements, and should manage its data storage requirements directly to disk.
Not "all software on GitHub" because most of that is proprietary. To run it yourself it generally needs to be [free software](https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/).
The dominant licenses on GitHub are Apache and MIT. Neither of those licenses designate proprietary software. Both allow me (as an individual) to run software myself.
In fact, the licenses which satisfy "free software" criteria -- GPL etc. -- are more or less impossible to use in any context where legal jurisprudence would apply. That means any context where a lawyer could possibly get involved.
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.
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
I think they're the largest managed hosting provider in this space. Obviously they are charging a premium compared to deploying it all yourself, but I think the prices are fair, and the plans give you a pretty good idea of the resources required.
No offense to the other admin, but $200/mo for 50 active users is way too high. A Kubernetes cluster for 50 users is obvious overkill IMO. Maybe you did it that way for the learning aspect, which is fine. You should be able to host 50 active users for a 10th of that cost though. You can easily do it on a single VPS.
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.
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.
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.
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.