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From GNU social to Mastodon

thomask.sdf.org

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Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#111

Post by throw2016 »

The problem is abuse of power and arbitrary behavior that affects many when they have even a little bit of power. This is what leads to censorship, suppressing views, bubbles and lack of accountability.

Mastodon does not solve this in the slightest, just enables thousands of arbitrary admins. At least with Twitter there is one source and its easier to seek some kind of accountability and put a global spotlight on them.

With platforms like Mastodon this becomes impossible. We instead quickly develop 'ingroups of admins' quietly suppressing others and not amenable to transparency or accountability. Decentralization is about diffusing control not empowering a super group of admins. If that is what you seek why not just stick to twitter.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#112

Post by throw2016 »

ad_hominem wrote: post #69

I tried Mastodon early on and it was pretty slow, which I assume is due to it being a Ruby on Rails app that probably wasn't heavily optimized. Probably also partly due to there only being a handful of popular instances so the inrush of users weren't being spread out very much. Anyone still encountering that? A fairly popular instance also crashed and lost all accounts, toots etc.: https://web.archive.org/web/2018032…

The choice of Ruby for a platform that is supposed to enable decentralization does not make sense.

Most Ruby apps have tens to hundreds of dependencies and require a build environment which immediately limits access to a smaller group of developers familiar with Ruby build environments and debugging their way out of any dependency hell. Customization also becomes a problem.

There is also no particular design in Mastodon itself to enable more transparency and prevent any arbitrary behavior and abuse of power.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#113

Post by Vinnl »

ifur wrote: post #107
Vinnl wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: this gets downvoted? reasonable technical criticism or dialogue. I'm quite sure the reason is that it's for me impossible to parse your message, even though I know what AJAX, Javascript, XML and Stylesheets are. If there really is a point in your message, you might want to try to reformulate it - perhaps in terms of how you as a user are actually negatively affected? (e.g. does Mastodon deplete your mobile su…

Is it lack of adjectives and positive or negative extensions that throws you of? This is hacker news, I'm talking about technical things. And you want me to limit myself to user experiences rather than back and forth on nerdy technicality? Edit to reply to the the reply below, apparently speed is frowned upon in HN: > Maybe this analysis helps: This is hyperbole :) >> Generally don't like AJAX > Not quite sure what A…

I don't want you to do anything; I'm just sharing that I can't make sense of what you're saying. I don't know why - it just looks like a list of words strung together.

Maybe this analysis helps:

> Generally don't like AJAX

Not quite sure what AJAX has to do with this - I don't think Mastodon differs from Twitter here? In the sense that it has webpages that make requests to servers without reloading the page.

> it's JS and XML

This is confusing as well. You refer to XML, which is probably due to the first method of sending HTTP requests without a full page request being the XMLHTTPRequest DOM API. I'm not sure if XML was necessarily involved when that was the only method, but I'm quite sure no XML is involved at all in Mastodon. But even if it was, it's not quite sure what the problem of that would be for you as a user.

> Twitter services don't require Stylesheets or XLS as it's called

This one is really hard to parse. My intuition would be that you're talking about Cascading Stylesheets (CSS), the method commonly used to define what a webpage looks like. But then you also mention XLS, which I assume does not refer to Microsoft Excel's file format, but I'm not quite sure what it does refer to - maybe you meant XSLT? But both Mastodon and Twitter use CSS (and I can't imagine you being against that), and neither uses XSLT?

> XML is bloated and creates metadata for sale.

As far as I know XML only contains the data the developers put in there, and the same would be true for alternatives such as the more commonly used JSON. And again, there's no XML in Mastodon.

> In addition to AJAX allowing Orwellian advertisement influence.

So I guess your point is that somehow there's more advertisement influence at Mastodon than at Twitter? Again, it's entirely unclear how that would be the case.

To sum up: it's probably downvoted because there doesn't appear to be reasonable criticism in here, and in fact, there doesn't really seem to be any content that one could even technically criticise.

I hope I at least made clear why I was unable to understand your post, or even to criticise it. I might have misunderstood, in which case do enlighten me, but it can at least explain why people downvote you. Hope that helps.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#114

Post by [deleted] »

epeus wrote: post #102
oopsman88 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, not everybody you disagree with acts in bad faith. Nazis, communists, anarchists, you name it: most of them believe their views of society will lead to a betterment of it. They don't adhere to their principles just because they want to fuck with others.

Nazi ideology is explicitly about fucking with others. It is about separating people who they disapprove of and killing them. If you're trying to normalise Nazis, you are one of them, and the 88 dogwhistle doesn't look good.

[deleted]

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#115

Post by oopsman89 »

epeus wrote: post #102
oopsman88 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, not everybody you disagree with acts in bad faith. Nazis, communists, anarchists, you name it: most of them believe their views of society will lead to a betterment of it. They don't adhere to their principles just because they want to fuck with others.

Nazi ideology is explicitly about fucking with others. It is about separating people who they disapprove of and killing them. If you're trying to normalise Nazis, you are one of them, and the 88 dogwhistle doesn't look good.

I think all ideas should be discussed in an open forum. If you think some people may become nazis, communists or pastafarians because those ideas appeal to them, it's because you're afraid the ideas you're trying to push on aren't that good to begin with. (Posting from another account because that one has been banned for no reason I can discern.)

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#116

Post by Vinnl »

throw2016 wrote: post #111

The problem is abuse of power and arbitrary behavior that affects many when they have even a little bit of power. This is what leads to censorship, suppressing views, bubbles and lack of accountability. Mastodon does not solve this in the slightest, just enables thousands of arbitrary admins. At least with Twitter there is one source and its easier to seek some kind of accountability and put a global spotlight on the…

It does enable you to be your own admin. Sure, it doesn't work if people sign up with arbitrary admins with arbitrary (ab)use of power, but even with an alternative that does "solve" it - it only works if people sign up there.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#117

Post by AsyncAwait »

throw2016 wrote: post #112
ad_hominem wrote: post #69

I tried Mastodon early on and it was pretty slow, which I assume is due to it being a Ruby on Rails app that probably wasn't heavily optimized. Probably also partly due to there only being a handful of popular instances so the inrush of users weren't being spread out very much. Anyone still encountering that? A fairly popular instance also crashed and lost all accounts, toots etc.: https://web.archive.org/web/2018032…

The choice of Ruby for a platform that is supposed to enable decentralization does not make sense. Most Ruby apps have tens to hundreds of dependencies and require a build environment which immediately limits access to a smaller group of developers familiar with Ruby build environments and debugging their way out of any dependency hell. Customization also becomes a problem. There is also no particular design in Masto…

Really?

There's official Docker images that I've been running sucesfully for a while, the deployment of Mastodon is really no different from any other self-hosted app these days.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#118

Post by AsyncAwait »

spc476 wrote: post #83
unimpressive wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People use software, the value add Mastodon has over GnuSocial is that it's software that advertises itself to users on its own merits. (Well that and a moderation policy that's stricter than Twitter's, supposedly.)

Yeah, but I'd like to use software that isn't written in PHP or Ruby (for a variety of reasons, some valid, and some not). If the protocol was better documented, there might be more choice.

The protocol is pretty well documented and even has a tutorial section: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#119

Post by throw2016 »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #117
throw2016 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The choice of Ruby for a platform that is supposed to enable decentralization does not make sense. Most Ruby apps have tens to hundreds of dependencies and require a build environment which immediately limits access to a smaller group of developers familiar with Ruby build environments and debugging their way out of any dependency hell. Customization also becomes a problem. There is also no particular design in Masto…

Really? There's official Docker images that I've been running sucesfully for a while, the deployment of Mastodon is really no different from any other self-hosted app these days.

This is even worse. Now you want the average user to know to now only know Ruby but also Docker? These are technologies for technical folks, the kind of troubleshooting required is not trivial.

And just packaging something in Docker does not make the need to understand it go away, what happens when things needs to be configured, when database connections don't work, when things go wrong? You still need to understand the software stack pretty well if you want to run it with any degree of confidence.

Re: From GNU social to Mastodon

#120

Post by AsyncAwait »

oopsman88 wrote: post #3

With all of its faults, I'll take Twitter and its almost free speech over Mastodon any day. Many people say they are quitting Twitter because of the algorithmic timeline and so on, and they are going to Mastodon where a cabal of people choose to ban opinions that are perfectly legal.

You're perfectly free to run your own instance and post whatever you like. Others might not want to read it, but that's your problem - you don't inherently deserve an audience, you have to convince people that you're worth following.

Luckily for you, there's also https://pleroma.social where they might align with your values[1] a lot more.

1 - I am pro free speech, however many on the right these days seem to think that free speech means they should be free to insult, abuse, impose their religion etc. on others, while also being free to ignore people's right to kneel, protest, worship Satan, support Palestine or whatever else they might want to do.

If that is the sort of "free speech" you're looking for, Mastodon might not be for you, otherwise it's a perfectly free speech tolerant place.

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