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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#91

Post by delusional »

EarlKing wrote: post #69
proactivesvcs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> much like Mastodon and friends which are rendered useless by racism and porn. I think you and I were on very different servers, and considering I've perused dozens, you must have gotten a really raw deal.

You don't have to look very hard to find screaming racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular biases and kinks. I note for the record that this is precisely the sort of thing that doomed Voat. They got invaded by racists who decamped there after being given the boot from Reddit and promptly beg…

Voat was specifically marketed towards the "free speech above all else" crowd, which will always attract people on the fringes since they are the ones with opinions too distasteful for the rest of society.

Many instances of mastodon on the other hand are happily engaged in real meaningful moderation. The owner is expected to moderate what type of content is allowed on their instance, with the federated aspect ensuring the "free speech".

That's not to say mastodon is without issues. The issues of voat just can't be transferred wholesale.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#92

Post by afavour »

egypturnash wrote: post #70
mschuster91 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on your VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and simple servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a huge, slow and hairy beast. Even if you get the tech stack solved to an easily deployable package: The problem is you still need to invest immense amounts of time on moderation. Some of that responsibility is enforced legally (e.g. CSAM, warez,…

I run an instance and I really have none of these problems. Keeping open applications off solves a lot of them, you have to ask me for an invitation and I’m not going to give you one if I think you’re going to be a problem. There’s a Patreon for it that pays the server bills despite it only being a few hundred users. My users even say thanks for running the place now and then. Running a small node of The People’s Glo…

> Keeping open applications off solves a lot of them, you have to ask me for an invitation

But that simply doesn't scale to the level of services like Twitter. You might argue, and I would agree with you, that maybe we'd be better off without services that are too large to moderate in any meaningful way, but we are where we are. An invitation-only Mastodon network is not a viable alternative to Twitter.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#93

Post by monkin »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #85
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…

Pay for what? It's not about making money. > By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? "That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this example. Partly, yes. But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance. Who's to say it couldn't be run just like an ema…

> Pay for what? It's not about making money.

For servers that run Mastodon.

> But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance.

Most users aren’t interested in contributing anything to the platform. Social media platforms popularity lays in simplicity. No one wants to run anything, just use service without any hassle.

> there are upwards of a million people using it right now.

Compare that to 200m+ users of Twitter sending 500m+ messages daily. I bet Mastdon can handle this without a sweat.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#94

Post by bitL »

mdrzn wrote: post #47
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…

"What will you do when MySpace shuts down?" We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of some users having to move multiple times because the server they are no closed.

Well, I shut down my FB page 6 years ago and didn't move anywhere else. The "social network" need died in me already.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#95

Post by oogali »

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…

Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were run?

Resources donated by an organization in the form of a server linked into a larger network, a committee that vetted new server applications to the network, volunteer administrators for the network and the individual servers, coordinated regional and global upgrades. And as network users increased, reforming under a hub and spoke models to improve scale and capacity.

And when a single IRC server went away after some time operating for its various reasons, the network kept going.

Could the average IRC user start/host their own instance *and* link it to the larger network? No. But they didn't need to.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#96

Post by robertlagrant »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #85
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…

Pay for what? It's not about making money. > By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? "That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this example. Partly, yes. But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance. Who's to say it couldn't be run just like an ema…

> "That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this example. Partly, yes.

Twitter pays people money to keep their service running, so there's that incentive.

> As for real life scenarios...there are upwards of a million people using it right now. I've made friends, networked professionally and found several homes there. I am literally a real life scenario and so are the people behind most of the posts there.

Twitter is, say, 300m MAUs. That would mean the volunteer Mastodon infra would have to increase 300x (assuming scaling is linear, and the Mastodon community hits Mastodon as hard as Twitter users hit Twitter) to cope with similar traffic numbers.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#98

Post by registeredcorn »

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…

Just as a small nitpick, there is still a community on Flickr. There are certain elements that Photographers get out of Flickr that we don't get from Instagram, or other platforms. This isn't to say that the service is as big or powerful as it once was, but it has done an adequate, if not satisfactory job, at meeting the needs of its base.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#99

Post by OrangeMonkey »

I am sad that they are shutting down but we have more options in the Fediverse still.

Its the rebirth of the promise of a censorship free internet. A lot of people have decided that its time we shut peoples mouths and stop them from talking 'for the greater good' - this is a pushback against it.

One day we will all remember why we should support free speech - god help us on that day.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#100

Post by thrdbndndn »

smcn wrote: post #90
thrdbndndn wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It doesn't move your toots does that even count as migrating then

Of course it does, but I do agree that it would be better if it did.

No seriously, I'm not being sarcastic.

You can't call keeping merely the contacts without emails themselves "migration of email provider". It makes no sense.

Also, you said "follower[s] don't have to do anything", but somehow you (the followee) on the other hand needs to actively move? What if my follower is on this instance too and they don't actively move? Shouldn't their account disappear (and you lost your follower)? I genuinely don't understand how it would work other than everyone has to manually move together.

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