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 not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.
Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
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"
He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.
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.
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.
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.
Look at email providers who suddenly decided "If you don't use it for X months, you're inactive and I'm deleting everything".
It's not about the service existing but people being able to extract and use what they've put in, in 10/20 years.
where is soon?
And also, do you have a crystal ball to predict the future?
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.
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?
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.
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"
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.
There's no central server, and not all of the instances talk to each other.
Where... where would you put the account data?
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.
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.
> 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.
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)
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
what, why? The load is hardly that high.
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.
Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
The Fediverse (or Federated Social Web as it was previously referred to in 2007[0] or so when it was first envisioned) will never close. Single installations may, but the network as a whole can not.
[0] https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_So...
I don't necessarily hold that opinion, but I get the impression most folks I know do.
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.
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.
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
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.
Oh, is that what this thread is about? Who says it is?
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.
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.
We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of some users having to move multiple times because the server they are no closed.
Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.
Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example hypothetical “black swan” events?
I hear they have the greatest censorship. Some say the best censorship. Nobody does censorship like Twitter. Not even close.
I think we might be experiencing this just in this year with its new ownership about to occur.
E: called them tweets
> 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.
And one of the weaknesses of a decentralized model compared to a distributed one.
That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care about.
Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of using M$ Instead of Microsoft?
Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling
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.
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)
The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems.
I'm not a Mastodon user, but this is haunting. Just like shady data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds" are running VPN nodes, subreddits etc, this architecture is practically designed for malicious actors. It wouldn't surprise me if it's already being used this way on other nodes.
To be clear, in 2005 this would have been great, tech is moving fast so one has to remain humble when critizising architectural decisions. Nevertheless, today we can't trust private data in hands of benevolent (and often de-facto anonymous) volunteer actors, if we want scale and security in the decentralized (or even federated) world.
We have had enormous progress in applied cryptography, both in social apps (Signal, Matrix) and defi (some successes, many failures to learn from). We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it. Doesn't mean that all data on a social app must be private, but DMs and invite only "groups" should be.
Currently, the typical website with per-node password auth doesn't satisfy these constraints, since credential harvesting is trivial. It's very difficult to build E2EE web apps and even if, users have no habit of keeping secrets on-device. The client itself needs to be vetted and accessed securely. Perhaps Matrix is best positioned in this space.
(Please correct me if I got any details wrong)
> 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""
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 ?
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.
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).
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 working on exactly that: a service that acts as an ActivityPub server (code[1], example[2], example application running on top of it[3]) for users in the form of a static binary. It supports multiple storage backends that can be selected individually or all together at build time and it can be extended to many more.
[1] https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox
[3] https://littr.me
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).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
The other problem is that charging $1/month is a practical pain in the ass. For micropayments, processors will easily take 20-30% of that.
There is fix for this, which is Fedverse Relays, but guess what ? Mastodons official servers don't use them.
I mean, what's the problem of using other means of communication to publish/promote your identity?
I am far from being internet famous, and I get at least one follower every week on Mastodon simply because I put it on my Twitter bio.
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.
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.
Social networks should have private data and E2EE, plain and simple. And the hosting challenges and centralization is why we are here discussing Mastodon.
[1] https://edtechfactotum.com/migrating-to-a-new-mastodon-home/
Maybe 2 minutes for the technical side, then 2 months of getting all your old followers to follow you at your new address.
> if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;)
Or use a different protocol...
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.
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).
https://cerulean.matrix.org is another POC Matrix based Twitter clone (built for Jack & Parag) that demonstrates this (but without decentralised accounts yet).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So just allowing for personal connections will also work to federate but a lot slower.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
That said the maintainer has my sincere prayers for his family and for his path in life.
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.
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.
> 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.
I am sorry to hear that, but I can totally support them, and sincerely wish them the best of luck, dealing with a pretty awful situation.
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.
We invite you & anyone to register: https://Mastodon.Tech/registration
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.
Since 2006 we've hosted a technology forum so this is a natural extension: https://hostboards.com/discussion/5854/hostboards-partners-w...
Why bravery to say "I don't know; I could probably find out but I cannot."
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.
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.
It doesn't move your toots, but followers don't have to do anything to still follow you on your new account.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30447645
I think it was only a matter of time before the human resources issue came front and center. My hope is that there can be a good balance between small federated instances kept alive by altruistic volunteer admins and larger instances with enough moderation and funding to handle the number of users that a social network expects but increase centralization. Maybe the conclusion will be that no matter how the technology scales, finding a way for the instances to be kept alive will be a social problem that requires constant attention.
The reliability issue also makes me wonder how much of the Fediverse is setting itself up for link rot and the loss of unique content after their maintainers lose passion or move on. And that wouldn't be because of a business decision that is hard to empathize with (in the case of Google+), but simply because a single human body has its limits.
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 ?
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.
What the hell? Is this the 1990s?
Encryption at rest protects against someone walking away with the database, not an admin.
Best of luck in the future and best of luck with your family.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastod...
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.)
Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it?
Not enough marketing?
Bad UX?
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.
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.
It works for certain demographics but not most.
This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.
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.
Gaps/opportunities for Fediverse community:
- sustainable mgmt structure and plan for large nodes
- features to import content while not breaking existing ecosystem (it's currently possible to move followers and export content only, but not import)
Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
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.
If you have DC and power sponsored you can get real far.
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.
See:
Moving or leaving accounts: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>
It's also possible to move an entire instance to a new machine:
Migrating to a new machine: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/>
