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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#21

Post by phaer »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #3

> The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. 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?

> Can you really build a social network on volunteers that invest their own money and time, with little reward?

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.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#22

Post by rglullis »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #14

This is why I haven't gotten into mastodon. What server do I choose? At best they're internet forums from the 90s where the admin eventually has to move on (for often valid reasons, like in this case.) 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 gra…

If you don't trust anyone with your data, just host it yourself.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#23

Post by fleg »

lorealpnis wrote: post #18

Is "migrating to another server" as simple as singing up on other servers? Or is there a different straightforward way?

Moving to another instance is pretty easy: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration

It doesn't move your toots, but followers don't have to do anything to still follow you on your new account.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#24

Post by berkes »

HankB99 wrote: post #13

Ash: I'm sorry to hear about the health issue that precipitated this. I wish you the best outcome but realize that that does not always happen. 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…

Mastodon has a migration path for users to move to other instances. So when the server admins allow it (i.e. don't just shutdown, or kick someone off) moving is rather easy.

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).

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#25

Post by noirscape »

berkes wrote: post #15
spiderfarmer wrote: post #3

> The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. 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?

The tech also doesn't help. 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…

There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in terms of memory & cpu usage.

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.

[1]: https://pleroma.social/

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#26

Post by capableweb »

rglullis wrote: post #11

On the one hand, I am sad to hear about it and even more so due to the circumstances. 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 f…

Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something.

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).

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#27

Post by [deleted] »

yellow_lead wrote: post #17
somehnacct3757 wrote: post #14

This is why I haven't gotten into mastodon. What server do I choose? At best they're internet forums from the 90s where the admin eventually has to move on (for often valid reasons, like in this case.) 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 gra…

Well, where do you expect your data to be stored? In the ether?

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#28

Post by proactivesvcs »

This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move.

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.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#29

Post by bscphil »

Reminds me of a point I made about Pinboard. It's surprising to me that despite the success of open source software we haven't developed good systems for community administration of public services. Web services that aren't owned by large companies tend to be run with a bus factor of 1.

> 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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26200441

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