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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

211–220 of 604 posts

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#211
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…

> PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance.

This isn't a law of the universe, it's just software people haven't written yet. Installing new client-side apps was hard, until it wasn't. "Anyone can start their own instance" will be easy once someone writes the software to make it so. (Presumably a cloud provider like AWS, since that's who stands to profit from lots of people wanting to run server-side apps)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#212
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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.

"and Discord servers"

vomits in my mouth a bit

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#213

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…

I think you could create a system that's resilient to such issues even with federation (not saying it's easy, though), and Matrix actually has a solution in the works for this – decentralised user accounts [1].

And all of this makes me wonder – maybe it's better to re-implement something like Mastodon on top of Matrix. If Matrix adopts decentralised user accounts, that would seemingly solve such issues automatically. There was a POC Matrix based Twitter clone demonstrating this, actually [2] (but without the decentralised accounts yet).

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/246

[2] https://github.com/hackervera/freebird

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#214
post #102
post #93

Earlier 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…

This right here. He's right you know. Everyone knows that Mastodon can't handle this amount of users and after 6 years, it's enough to see that by itself it has failed, (unless you count Truth Social as a great example of a Mastodon usage that has more users than Mastodon itself in less than a year) It is not early days anymore and no non-technical user is interested in hosting their own servers for chatting with ano…

And hell, even tech users aren’t inclined to sign up for a sysadmin role for free with absolutely nothing in return except users berating you whenever there’s problems. Which there will be at some point in time. Source: I ran chat services for friends. I no longer run chat services for friends.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#215
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...

Google isn't really a good example, they love killing off services on a whim. Meta closing down Facebook would be much more... dramatic, shall we say.

Google+ is a great example of the point that once a community's platform gets shut down, it's often tough to find another place to meet, and some people don't survive the transition.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google isn't really a good example, they love killing off services on a whim. Meta closing down Facebook would be much more... dramatic, shall we say.

MySpace and AIM might be better examples then.

Or geocities.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.

> How will your argument hold up when f c book finishes dying? We'll find out soon enough. Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.

"soon enough" could be a decade relative to the assumption that they'll be around forever.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#218
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

An RSS reader does almost everything I'd expect my fully distributed Twitter instance to do. Only thing missing is ability to post, packaged into the same client.

RSS doesn't let people lead discussions through their posts, or did I get something wrong about RSS?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Having used Mastodon for years now, my experience has been that when I receive an abusive/spam/troll message it's a safe bet that it was from a Pleroma instance. I know I'm lot alone in defaulting to distrusting users on Pleroma instances. Just something for new fediverse users to keep in mind.

No post body was provided.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#220

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…

You also dont have to look very hard for large communities that absolutely will not tolerate racists.

The difference between the fediverse and most other online places for manyyyyyy fediverse users who use it day to day is that if a bunch of racists show up and start making things shitty then somebody (mods) will ACTUALLY do something about it whereas every other online platform just didnt really care or defend the vulnerable.

Are there large communities of racists on isolated parts of the fediverse? Sure. It is an open source software, even Trump's shitstick social network tried to steal and use mastodon.

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