Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 604 posts

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#71

Post by proactivesvcs »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #44
proactivesvcs wrote: post #28

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 insta…

Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.

f*c*book has been floundering for some years now and is lurching from trying to follow one trend to the next, pouring money into each attempt and everything twitter seems to do causes another exodus. They'll be brought out and then hollowed out, or attempt a major pivot which will be fatal for their global relevance. This is without the spectre of data protection laws offering us more and more protection from the abuse of these sorts of platforms, having themselves broken up by monopolies, their revenue stream being cut off wholesale by the likes of Apple, investors and big customers finally realising they're paying for bots and I'm sure several other bear traps just waiting for them to stumble into.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#72

Post by thrdbndndn »

k__ wrote: post #6

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?

IMHO, its decentralized nature just isn't compatible with most user, or the concept of social media.

It works for certain demographics but not most.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#73

Post by noasaservice »

loceng wrote: post #64
qznc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...

"... the indie RPG scene laments its demise." Where did they move?

Sometimes when communities die or are killed, they don't come back. Nobody knows where to go to re-convene.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#74

Post by elikoga »

monkin wrote: post #67
proactivesvcs wrote: post #28

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 insta…

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project ado…

> Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds

what, why? The load is hardly that high.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#75

Post by rvz »

k__ wrote: post #6

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?

All of the above, plus little to no-one actually bothered to use it daily, with not enough users to even talk to and compared to Twitter, Mastodon has an extremely limited network effect.

This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#76

Post by zeroclip »

asim wrote: post #43
samatman wrote: post #42

My condolences to the admin, this is sad news. This strengthens my conviction that federation is a bad architecture for something like Mastodon. A fully distributed system, urbit being the easiest to try right now, can't stick someone with the responsibility to keep a bunch of other people online. It can't stick those people with the responsibility to move off the server. Each user runs a server process, locally or o…

Doing full P2P just isn't there yet. It makes total sense but without talking about some web3 Blockchain, it's hard to get everyone to run a distributed database, identity server, etc without it being some single binary.

This is where blockchain ends up shining, since there are economic incentives to running a node.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#77

Post by carlchenet »

Enthousiasm is paramount in community work. But managing server infrastructure is more and more complex and it won't go simpler. People should consider joining associations which would be responsible, not individuals. Maybe less servers but larger and better managed ones. Associations are more resilient than individuals.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#78

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

noirscape wrote: post #56
knewter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox is a frontend that works atop either mastodon, pleroma, or the rebased backend 2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better maintained than pleroma

I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a technical decision he forced through after it was deemed to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch of alternate endpoints…

Can we stop villifying people we disagree with?

I've seen it so much, I'm more inclined to believe it absolutely didn't happen that way.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#79

Post by madmoose »

elikoga wrote: post #74
monkin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project ado…

> Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds what, why? The load is hardly that high.

When the Musk takeover was first announced it was practically impossible to register on many of the most popular Mastodon instances.

An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#80

Post by insightcheck »

loceng wrote: post #64
qznc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...

"... the indie RPG scene laments its demise." Where did they move?

This is just a guess, but probably various subreddits and Discord servers. It's probably not the same because the platforms are very different, but people will find new platforms even if the conversation changes due to different forum/messaging UI designs.
Post reply on HN