How Does Mastodon Work? • Hacker News Board

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#61

Post by ReverseCold » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:53 AM UTC

derefr wrote: post #31

Pfhreak wrote: post #3

The thing I never really see from these is about setting up on an existing instance vs running my own. And if I set up my own, does it need to be a community? Am I shutting myself out of an experience by creating, say, a Mastodon instance for my family? I'm bought in to the idea of Mastodon, but getting started is like being handed an atlas of the US and being told, "Please pick a neighborhood to live in."

It’s exactly like email. You can have an email server @yourdomain that just has the one account, and interact with the rest of the email “network” just fine, right? Same with Mastodon.

People discovery isn't necessary with email, but it is for a social networking system.

I want to be able to find other people in the fediverse, and I also want people to find me. Having your own server excludes you from other people's local timelines (and vice versa), making discovery in both directions very challenging.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#62

Post by ReverseCold » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 5:56 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #52

colanderman wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is unfortunate. I consider myself a highly skilled technical user, and the burden of running and maintaining my own Mastodon server, or even my own Nginx server to redirect WebFinger requests somewhere else, exceeds the free time I have to devote to the problem. (Keeping another VM alive, updated, and configured through the years costs mental energy, time, and money.) Whereas, adding an SRV record to my existin…

I don't understand why these federated social networks don't use standard email addresses for identity.

Well first and foremost, people usually don't want their email published everywhere. Especially in this decentralized context, that'd be a gold mine for spammers.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#63

Post by ReverseCold » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:00 AM UTC

jaequery wrote: post #53

cortesoft wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem right. The API for an instance is going to be the Mastodon API, which will be the same for all instances. Each instance isn't going to be creating their own API - really, all Mastodon is is an API spec.

yes what i was saying is, i doubt you will be able to hit one mastodon API and get the tweets across all the federated instances. you will only retrieve the data of that single instance you are hitting. if that instance only has 1 user, then that will be all you are getting. but please correct me if im wrong. i havent really dived too much into it.

Browsing the global timeline of the main and pixiv instances could probably let you see most of the network.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#64

Post by baxtr » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:07 AM UTC

I hope Mastodon will develop into a real twitter alternative one day. Currently it’s rather “empty”

If anyone is intersted in a German round-up of Mastodon: https://www.achtungtechnik.de/archives/2018/mastodon/

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#65

Post by CookieMon » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:08 AM UTC

woolvalley wrote: post #58

saurik wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wish the author had expanded on migration from one instance to another and what it entails (similar to the questions and responses here). Account migration is not a thing yet, and conceptually requires a new namespace for referencing accounts (such as public keys). There is a multi-year-long actively-discussed open issue thread about this problem. https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/177

What is the migrate account thing at the bottom of edit profile then? Move to a different account If you wish to redirect this account to a different one, you can configure it here.

There are multiple account migration issues, the hardest is what happens when the hobbyist/volunteer instance you use inevitably goes down for good - you lose your address, your social network connections, your posts/history etc. That's unlikely to happen if you use the main Mastodon instance, but an aim of Mastodon is that you don't.

In that situation you can't log into the old site to edit your profile to have it redirect people to a new account, and even if you could the redirect will still go down with the server.

Mastodon can't fix these problems alone because the whole fediverse protocol needs to be rethought. Hubzilla saw this as the fundamental issue facing federated social media and so it was designed around a solution they call "nomadic identity" - you can shift your Hubzilla identity across many servers, keeping all your posts and subscriptions, and all the Hubzilla stuff updates and points to the new place, but subscriptions to you from Mastodon/fediverse will still break.

Perhaps Mastodon can lead the work on a newer protocol for the fediverse.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#66

Post by colordrops » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:12 AM UTC

ReverseCold wrote: post #62

colordrops wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why these federated social networks don't use standard email addresses for identity.

Well first and foremost, people usually don't want their email published everywhere. Especially in this decentralized context, that'd be a gold mine for spammers.

Why couldn't you create an email identity specifically for social networking.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#67

Post by nafey » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:15 AM UTC

codesections wrote: post #36

I wrote a companion piece that explains what makes Mastodon better than Twitter. It starts like this: > Mastodon is a newcomer social media platform that is a lot like Twitter—short messages, followers, hashtags, all that. But Mastodon is much better than Twitter, and not just because being totally ad-free and keeping chronological timelines make it far more enjoyable to use (though that certainly helps!). All that i…

I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#68

Post by INTPenis » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:22 AM UTC

Uhhrrr wrote: post #46

The failure to mention GNU Social, which Mastodon is almost completely based upon and which birthed the Fediverse, is just weird.

Mastodon is not based on GNU Social in any way other than they both used the OStatus protocol. Before ActivityPub became the norm.

GNU Social is made in PHP and Mastodon is made with Ruby and NodeJS. So two wildly different implementations.

Mastodon also looked more modern and followed more so called modern developing practices. Which is why I think it caught on more than GNU Social ever did.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#69

Post by merinowool » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:25 AM UTC

nafey wrote: post #67

codesections wrote: post #36

I wrote a companion piece that explains what makes Mastodon better than Twitter. It starts like this: > Mastodon is a newcomer social media platform that is a lot like Twitter—short messages, followers, hashtags, all that. But Mastodon is much better than Twitter, and not just because being totally ad-free and keeping chronological timelines make it far more enjoyable to use (though that certainly helps!). All that i…

I wonder if in the long run Mastodon will still not be an "outrage machine". Twitter also didn't start out as a vent for political outrage, but as a platform grows it gets more bad apples. In the case of Mastodon it's decentralized nature actually provides them more security. It will be interesting to see it play out.

It will be easier for governments to shut down small instances and smear the owners. I don't think decentralisation has much security value.

Re: How Does Mastodon Work?

#70

Post by INTPenis » Mon, Aug 06, 2018, 6:27 AM UTC

caf wrote: post #6

How does it deal with spam?

That's the key question imo.

I run an instance and the last 2-3 days I've been flooded with spam bots. Reading github issues and toot threads I've noticed it's a big issue and has been coming in waves on other instances this summer.

I like to draw parallels to e-mail because Mastodon's issues are very similar to the issues we had with email in the 90s.

So I've seen mastodon instance admins mention things like maintaining centralized blacklists. I've even seen people mention using spamassassin to train on mastodon toots instead of mails.

Sign-ups of spambots are likely automated yet reCaptcha is out of the question because Mastodon users tend to dislike big corporations like Google.

I hope VisualCaptcha is a viable option but we'll see.

Some claim that captcha is a waste of time altogether because they can be defeated but my opinion is that it would still protect against most less sophisticated bot networks.

Short answer; right now there is no real solution other than manually banning and adding server IPs to a 800+ strong list of banned IP subnets maintained on github. There is also the option of banning MX servers because the last wave of bot signups all used the same backend MX server. Even though they used a ton of e-mail domains.

And of course requiring confirmation of new accounts by admins.

I predict spam is going to be a very hot topic in the fediverse for a while still.

Mastodon is community driven, not backed by any one big corporation. Anything driven by the internet community is going to be wilder than a centralized solution. It will be the wild wild west of social media. There is no denying or escaping that fact.