Mastodon 2.5 released • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#41

Post by drb91 » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:45 PM UTC

wdewind wrote: post #30

confounded wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried Mastodon? You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be invol…

> Have you tried Mastodon? Yes. > You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example. Right, you either pay with your time or your money, as opposed to FB for which you pay nothing at all. Specialization of labor reduces costs, federation increases them. > This is…

Well, facebook does collect your data and show ads to you. Hardly free at all. There’s a reason they refuse to charge.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#42

Post by ENZ0 » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

wdewind wrote: post #6

The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. For instance, the solution to content moderation and har…

   "there are more people moderating,"

The net effect is that you'll more likely come into contact with the kind of preferential modding that suits your own tastes.

Birds of a feather. One community might mod your type with an iron fist, but jump to another server, where a diametrically opposed set of opinions prevail, and you'll feel more at home.

...or something like that.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#43

Post by mychinsrmynips » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:48 PM UTC

wdewind wrote: post #6

The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. For instance, the solution to content moderation and har…

I think you are entirely correct and your view does not need to be changed. If you look at how everything is playing out on a geopolitical scale, authoritarian states are winning over democracy. At a macro scale, even in the politics of Tech you can see this. Tech platforms are put under immense pressure from their users to moderate the platform. No one wants to spend the time to filter someone from their view, block people, any of that. They want the platform to do it for them. Platforms KNOW THIS.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#44

Post by hannasanarion » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:53 PM UTC

wdewind wrote: post #33

Crespyl wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. > People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. I think people mostly want a smaller power to d…

> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually…

> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales.

I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system?

The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.

The main difference is that, if you want something smaller and less overbearing, it's a lot cheaper to move from mastodon.social to some small instance than it is to move from California to Vermont.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#45

Post by chooseaname » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:54 PM UTC

panarky wrote: post #9

So tweets are "toots" in Mastodon. Could it be that extinct mastodons grunted or growled instead of tooting? I would rather bark, bleat, caw, croak, howl, quack or screech. Toot? Nah. Too many associations with musical fruits.

The mammoth on The Flintstones had a human voice.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#46

Post by Twisol » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:57 PM UTC

naavis wrote: post #22

progval wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or named their tweets "toots". It's like they want it to fail. Why?

It's a slang word for farts.

It's also used in more musical contexts, as with horns and trumpets -- for instance, "to toot one's own horn". (Animals with large trunks, like elphants and mastodons, would be considered to trumpet.) The fact that a fart makes a sound like that of a trumpet merely makes it a convenient bowdlerization.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#47

Post by wdewind » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 7:59 PM UTC

drb91 wrote: post #40

wdewind wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually my exact point. Why did FB come after phpBB? And I guess I'd argue: there actually aren't that many phpBB communities, relative to the numbers of people on Twitter and FB. If Mastodon (or federation in general) was going to "work" we'd see no FB and tons more phpBB type implementations.

I’m not sure how you could conclude that given that FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible. Meanwhile, people continue to seek out communities that do represent the types of interactions people want. I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is.

> I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is.

Maybe I'm defining succeeding too narrowly, and sorry to be rude, but what universe do you live in where this is even close to true? Some quick googling shows the network hadn't even cracked 100k users in Feb: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99469840739197657

> FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible

Right, and it does that by providing a better (a matter of taste, perhaps), cheaper product than Mastodon via specialization of labor, and through network effects, both of which depend on centralization.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#48

Post by some_account » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 8:03 PM UTC

wdewind wrote: post #6

The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor. For instance, the solution to content moderation and har…

The general public will use the popular centralized services that is using their data to get rich.

There is still room for technical alternatives for users who want something different, even if that is only 0.1%.

Even with Slack being very popular, irc is not going away, because it still is better than Slack in areas that are valuable to people. No lock-in, open source protocols, and also the fact that it's still good after all these years.

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#49

Post by mkl » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

mothsonasloth wrote: post #5

Still not sure why they named it after an extinct Mammoth.

Mastodons were quite different from mammoths, and not closely related. Mammoths were relatively close to Asian elephants, diverging something like 7 million years ago (like us and chimpanzees), but mastodons diverged from elephants and mammoths more like 25 million years ago (like old world monkeys and apes/humans).

Re: Mastodon 2.5 released

#50

Post by wdewind » Wed, Sep 05, 2018, 8:09 PM UTC

hannasanarion wrote: post #44

wdewind wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers. This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually…

> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales. I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system? The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. J…

> I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system?

One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things.

> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.

The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation, removing the right to leave, effectively centralizing it under federal control) when the country was founded.

(Edit: I reversed the terms confederation and federation here, but what I mean is that the founding of the US removed sovereignty from the states.)

This is where the rubber meets the road: any decentralized system will need to be able to answer the question "how do we [the govt, usually] forcibly remove content from the network?" The way you answer that question will be the way the network centralizes.

The history of true confederations (Colonial States, Personal Computing, the Internet) is that they are temporary chaotic moments before we revert back to the mean of centralization (United States, SaaS/FB/Gmail/centralized communication and iphones as tracking devices, PRISM).

This is all an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law. Our culture is not confederated, and so we wont be able to build scalable confederated systems within it.