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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

111–120 of 604 posts

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#111
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were run? I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.

And yet a large number of channels and a large number of communities migrated seamlessly to Libera and survived.

> migrated seamlessly

I disagree with that characterization.

> and survived

Survival is not the issue. Mastodon will survive. Tumblr survives. Even MySpace survives. But major disruptions tend to lose users.

(And yes it's true that the potential Twitter acquisition is a potential major disruption. But it's not going to be shut down after a $44 billion investment.)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#112
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it’s federated. You can have an invite only network that still federated with the rest of the network.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#113
post #67

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. How do you approach this?

The same people who pay for everything right now will pay for it: us. Some instances will have patreon, others will be voluntary donation, others will use some craptocurrency, others will have contractual subscriptions, some will have ads... And whatever models are best will win out. Quit with the FUD. Just sit, back, relax and watch it happen.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#116
I was not part of your community, but thank you for what you've done with it.

May you have all the needed grace, patience, wisdom, and strength (both physical and mental) to navigate this next stage of your life in caring for someone who needs you more than ever right now.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#117
post #105
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a daily IRC user I can say this: IRC never was reliable. Constant attacks, splits, nick squatting or other crap ware pain in the ass. That’s why it never was adopted as a mainstream communication platform, and at its peak it had maybe 400k+ users. Now most of that are bots and stale sessions.

As a daily IRC user: IRC was never reliable, but it persists still. A distributed system is easier to hurt but far harder to destroy.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#118
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> For servers that run Mastodon.

Running a server that can cope with thousands of users would probably cost just a few dollars a month. Donations would be more than sufficient.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#119
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, hosting is a cost and it is not 'free', hence the frequent downtime with Mastodon instances, even when they had traffic during Elon's takeover of Twitter many of then could not even handle the new users. Also, these users don't even know which instance to go to, since there is little to no-one to talk on there. If there are 'hundreds of thousands' of users then that means they have just recentralized on Mastodon…

Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Do you have some kind of personal issue with the protocol? There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.

> Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here?

Yes, I said: 'Little to no users'. After looking at it for a couple of years, it is not the typical twitter user that is self hosting their own Mastodon instance and just the same tech-folks that are doing that (unreliably) and sitting on Mastodon. The level of social interaction on Mastodon is so low and limited, that they still use their Twitter accounts more than their Mastodon accounts.

So yes, it is not early days anymore and we have given it enough time and it has already failed.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#120
post #67

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.Social has a Patreon page. Quite a few supporters. Obviously Wikipedia, NPR etc are a model.
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