This got me wondering, I created a Mastodon user @ defcon.social and my first couple of posts were images, just to test things out and get started with my chosen client - Ivory by Tapbots (the creators of Tweetdeck, RIP) after tptacek spoke glowingly of it here. Then I realised that by posting those I'm basically taking up space on a community service without paying for it, and I wasn't sure exactly what the etiquette was. On a commercial, monetised service like Twitter it's different as there are advertisers (or at least there were...) but afaik "defcon.social" is just a non-profit and I'd really like not to be a big cost sink.
Also I wondered if there's any overhead involved in following users across many different instances - if my @defcon.social user follows a bunch of users on various other instances does that place additional burden on their mastodon instance or just on my local client?
Might be time for me to read the defcon.social fine print and T&Cs (I only glanced over it) or even about Mastodon/ActivityPub generally...
It caches all media that you view, and I assume it might prefetch stuff to. It has a tool that prunes out old cached images and such. However that script isn't setup to run automatically (or if it is, its far too loosey-goosey)
However the biggest killer is that it doesn't clear cached user page header images. Here is the output of my cache. Headers are not cleaned, and need to be deleted manually.
Attachments: 1.43 GB (8.19 MB local)
Custom emoji: 61.9 MB (0 Bytes local)
Preview cards: 344 MB
Avatars: 3.01 GB (71.7 KB local)
Headers: 6.69 GB (172 KB local)
Backups: 0 Bytes
Imports: 0 Bytes
Settings: 36.2 KBSo if 10,000 people on server A subscribe to someone on server B then server B will send 10,000 duplicate messages to server A.
I hope I’m wrong but that’s what I’ve heard.
The usage can be contained with a few cron jobs to purge old cached content aggressively. Running
`tootctl statuses remove && tootctl media remove` once a week is enough to make it sane in my case.
My personal instance has been up two months with 12 GB space used, but only 88 MB of that is my stuff; the rest is just the cache of others' posts. That can be fairly aggressively cleared out, and I think Mastodon lets you configure an automatic purging of this data.
Though we all love archive.ph, FT Alphaville isn't behind a paywall. Email registration -- on the far right of the barrier page -- gives unlimited access.
I set up the server during the peak exodus from Twitter. We use Twitter a lot, both to get stories out and to listen to readers, so the risk of it dying was very real. We made the decision to get a minimal-viable-product up asap, to give our Twitter refugee readers somewhere to go.
Urgency to act meant avoiding committees and working the difficult stuff out later. But Twitter survived, 'Don user engagement was meh, and the difficult stuff became not worth it.
The 160gb thing isn't just a Johnny Mnemonic reference. I'm a lazy coder who relies on cludges, so my 'Don deployment was a mess of duplication and surplus. About three weeks after launch the server hit 100% storage and crashed. I had the option of fixing the code or buying more space. Because I'm lazy I took the second option. A week later it hit 100% and crashed again.
Though it was obvious the setup was broken, the long-term strategy of repair always lost out to the short-term fix of buying more space.
We talked about keeping the server going but restricting it to staff only. Ultimately though, it still involved jumping through many hoops to make everything compliant, and while we all like the Fediverse to varying degrees it hasn't yet become essential to our work. We just couldn't justify the time required.
Maybe the FT can be convinced into doing something official eventually. I'm certainly not against it, so long as I'm not involved in the IT or legal side.
was it the sheer amount of content, or just that it was outside the sphere of support (both legal and technical) to be useful?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62688532
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files
Democracy is a bit of a prisoner's dilemma.
There will always be people who want to take away your freedom of speech; especially other countries. Any exception to freedom of speech basically can never be weaponized. "Hate Speech" is readily and easily weaponized against your political opponents.
Everyone gets the right to speak or nobody does. Which is what we have right now. I realize where this post shall go.
A democracy where you cannot speak to your political opponents is a democracy doomed to collapse.
I've never seen anyone say this before. Could you elaborate how? Like speaking over someone so they may not speak?
In terms of paradox of tolerance. Even in the USA, there are limits on free speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
You cant advocate for violence in the USA. Not only is this not protected by free speech, it's a crime.
The assertion of "tolerance without limit" doesnt apply. There's your limits right there.
Elon's twitter never changed this rule. You may not advocate for violence on twitter. This is not in contradiction with Elon's free speech absolutism.
What's important to understand is say Reddit who has eliminated free speech. What do you earn? You earn echo chambers, you divide your populous. You never solve your problems. Each side sees only the worst of the other side. Nobody talks to each other again. Political polarization is 100% because of no free speech on social media.
>You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
I'm shadow banned and flagged on HN so I can't respond to you until it's lifted. Guess it was more than a 1 hour ban. Imagine attempting to have a conversation on HN and not being able to reply
Good ole -10, goto jail for me. Thanks prisoners dilemma.
How ironic, but not surprising. What a waste of time. So long and thanks for all the fish.
Thats the entire point of ftalphaville. Its a great read, and free, barring email signup
If everyone was as risk-averse as the FT comes off in this article, we would not have any creations of note.
I don't get why newspapers don't use Mastodon as a standard for their comment sections. Social networks are all about credibility. By moderating their users and requiring a fee, newspapers could become the service for credible accounts and reclaim the social network space from Facebook.
Again, the newspaper assuredly did all the homework around building policies around moderating social media decades ago. They just aren’t putting two and two together.
I should be able to follow @ClarkKent@mastodon.daily-planet.info - that'll tell me that the account is who it says it is.
But mastodon.daily-planet.info absolutely shouldn't have a public registration.
Running a social network isn't for the faint-hearted. But running a publishing platform should be as simple as running a website.
Why is this consider stupidly easy? What kind of website are talking about, because the websites I run and have run in the past are not so simple
If you're running a basic WordPress / CMS - then running Mastodon should be as simple as that (i.e. pay someone to host and run).
If you're running a global website with a load of subdomains, custom features, CDNs, etc - then running Mastodon should be as simple as your existing infrastructure.
Quote: "It is therefore with relief and regret that we announce the shutdown of Alphaville.club, this blog’s completely unofficial home on the Fediverse. Our reasons are listed below in full but, to summarise, Mastodon has proved more hassle than its worth."
I also think Pleroma or one of its forks (Akkoma, etc.) might be far less hassle to run while still being compatible with the same metaverse protocol, because Elixir (with erlang/OTP underneath) is far more resource-efficient than Ruby is (we're talking orders of magnitude more efficient in both CPU and memory efficiency, although content storage demands would likely remain necessary to keep a lasso on)
At least with Nostr (compared to Mastodon) this won't be a problem anymore, at least some decent implementation of the declaration of independence of Cyberspace.
"the problem is that most major states are pressuring corporations to limit speech."
Corporations want family friendly sites with only happy thoughts.
I mean it's a common thing to not have end-to-end encryption. Gmail, Instagram, Discord, all can read DMs of logged in users.
Something being open source doesn't mean it's end to end encrypted.
Only some messengers have end to end encryption, like WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, etc. There are plans for mastodon to get E2EE as well, there is some backend work done but it seems to not be used in the mobile apps yet.
that made me laugh out loud
They really do have some of the ingredients, but they are missing key ones. I'd say the biggest limitation to building a social platform from even as rarefied a captive demographic as their esteemed readership is that when your livelihood is based on relationships and narrative over concrete physical skills, the stakes on being controversial are too high.
If you are a financial advisor and you are controversial in public and lose, among peers whose stock in trade is being aligned to the highest powers available, you lose your credibility and place in your pecking order. Whereas, if someone decides I'm on the wrong side of a narrative, I can still write code, build something, or make it work.
Opinions are what we have when we're not actually doing the thing we have the opinion about, so it's my indulgence to be provocative about how well the world is being run - because I'm not the one doing it. All the world is indeed a stage, and getting all the best lines is almost fair compensation for having to put up with its managers. The issue of our time is that the people running the world think people like me have a bit too much freedom to mock their degenerate incompetence, and they think controlling public forums is going to be easier than doing a more credible job.
There is an iron law about the trade off between autonomy and power, where power is to act through others, and autonomy is to act without others. Quality discourse (social media content), and news stories, require some kind of friction or conflict to make them interesting and compelling. This disqualifies powerful people from participating as themselves because the risk of alienating the people through whom they act is too high. (Musk is the exception that makes the rule.)
The "social" in social media means that it's for kids and plebes like us who can afford to have drunk pictures of themselves on the internet because we aren't engaged in the all-against-all political power struggle that defines elite competition - the world most FT/Economist readers inhabit. My opinions have nothing to do with my ability to fix computers, where for the typical FT reader, their opinions signal their alignment, status, and reputation. They can't risk their reputations on making the kind of piquant online comment that makes this all so good.
I'm glad they learned you can't just "start your own" social media platform, but that wasn't the real obstacle for them. It's that, they'll never (shit)post like common people.
Every rule (if you already have them) will be broken, and you will soon find yourself surrounded by a shitton of moral and legal dilemmas. Not to mention the insane amount of work and attention that has to be dedicated to it. It's a thankless job that never ends. Also, brace for people who have a different cultural, moral or legal understanding who want to argue against your (imperfect) decisions. It's a lot of responsibility and potential liability.
gotosocial: du -h | tail -1
3.8G .Bullshit! I could do that, and I'm broke!