why is the maintenance cost of a Mastodon instance so high? What is the technology stack?
From my experience, both Mastodon and Pleroma are massively overcomplicated resource hogs that are hard to set up, configure, or navigate.
Mastodon.technology Shutdown
141–150 of 604 posts
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#142This 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.
try opening any myspace/google+/orkut/and so on links and you can see this in action.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#143Earlier 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…
I am not participant but I have seen some invite only fediverse instances. Can't there be paid instances too, even pay by (please don't hate me here) watching ads ? Does actually anyone need to cater to millions of users?
Absolutely. In Mastodon it's a pretty simply setting IIRC and I expect it's commonplace across other microblogging platforms that use ActivityPub. I certainly wouldn't be against the principle of joining an instance that was paid for.
The whole "millions of users" fallacy is the result of people not being able to grasp what federation is about. The network can easily accommodate millions of users. Individual instances don't need to be able to.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 be…
Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a cryptographic verification based on a private key held by the user, so that they can prove to other servers/users that they are the same account as one that existed on a server that has shut down already? Is there something like that in Mastodon?
I think most people in this situation do the same thing people do on Twitter when it suspends an account for nonsense reasons like telling a Nazi to eat paste: make another, make a post, share it with a few friends off Twitter/Mastodon, have them RT/boost to circulate it within their circles. This seems to work pretty well.
Cryptographic certainty is fun to think about, but sometimes you just need people.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.)
The staffers setup the new servers and did all the heavy-lifting. As a user, I only had to point my client from Freenode to Libera (exactly one line change in my client config), run /msg nickserv register to register myself, run /msg chanserv register to register the channels I op-ed, and it was all done. Total time spent was less than 30 minutes. The next few days, others did the same and the community started trick…
And yet userbase got decimated for most channels when moving from Freenode to Libera. Just because it was only 30 minutes (for you or for anyone) doesn't mean people will go through the effort.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#146Earlier 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…
Is there anything to prevent a person/group from setting up a Mastadon instance with a charge to cover hosting, admin, & support costs (something like businesses charging for service on Open Source software support)? This could both make it more stable and sustainable and be a barrier to bots/trolls.
Nope - Mastodon supports invite-only which can aid in this sort of set-up; I'm sure other platforms do as well. And if one runs a close-knit community (which takes more than expertise and infrastructure), donations or something like a Patreon scheme can work.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#147Props to the instance for doing whatever they can to let people migrate their account somewhere else, and Mastodon has some provision already in place to create an alias and easily move your followers from one instance to another.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like this is personal for you somehow and I don't know why. I'm not "campaigning" against anything, I posted one comment on a message board. Let's try to avoid bringing hysteria into the conversation. I'm glad you ended up having a working relationship with your mechanic but I don't think it's really relevant here. Your mechanic is not maintaining an open source project. He's fixing your car. Which is a great…
stopped reading at the first sentence. Stop bringing your personal drama here please.
You do realise that you're the one being personally dramatic here, right? Especially with a comment like that.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Time to maintain it ain't free
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ensurin…
I don't recall Voat ever being specifically marketed as such, although it was certainly characterized as such in the press. It was literally just Atko's .NET knockoff of Reddit.
The only "marketing" a mastodon server does is the description on the main website though, what matters is who joins the server. It seems that people who would join a server that was characterized in the press as "free speech above all else" love racism and porn. It's the people on the server, not whatever the administrator claims to want.
I'm on mastodon.scholar and the most risque thing anyone has posted was a closeup of Neptune's uncensored moons. I don't disbelieve you, mastodon is part of Earth and unfortunately that means there are racists there, but I don't think your experience is typical.