31–40 of 604 posts
> 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?
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…
What do you think is the main issue with Mastodon not really getting mainstream adoption? Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it? Not enough marketing? Bad UX?
Network effects of twitter. Your friends are already on twitter if they still use this style of broadcast text based social media. Also recent privacy concerns and less recent issues with internet hostility means we're already past peak twitter, so mastodon is having to break into a declining market.
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…
There's also a "self destruct" feature in Mastodon which is the nice way to shut down an instance; it issues account deletion messages for every account to every instance it federates with. The idea being that this results in the federating instances processing the account deletions accurately.
As for requests to the original server; basically all instance software (Mastodon included) implement a backoff mechanism, meaning that if after 3 months your server is still returning 404s when requesting new information, the software will quietly stop requesting new info unless explicitly asked to do so by a user.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ter…
2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better maintained than pleroma
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ter…