Live data from Hacker News

Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

221–230 of 604 posts

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#221

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…

Closed source dies with the lack of money. Open source dies with the lack of users and attention. The problem is, money buys users. So for FOSS, it's a chicken and egg problem with the interplay of money and eyeballs.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#222
post #24

Earlier 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…

> 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. Do you mean that part of the protocol allows for a migration process that includes changing who your follows are pointing at? (assuming all servers involved are up to date and have this feature) I.e. did your account automatically start following your f…

Yes. The process has three steps: First, you update the receiving profile to "allow" the move by pointing at each other using the as:alsoKnownAs relationship. This allows everybody to confirm that the receiving account is participating in the move, and authorizes it. Then, you update your old account with the "movedTo" property, so that any new users who look up your account will see a notification that you've moved. Finally, you send out a Move activity to all of your followers, pointing at the new account. Automatically, all of your old followers who receive the Move activity will send Follow activities to the new "receiving" profile.

This process doesn't update any of the old content from your account, which was regarded at the time as a necessary simplification because of the issues of updating canonical URIs for accounts on one system to accounts on another system (different software might have different expected routes, you might need to store lookup tables, etc etc. It just opens up a huge can of worms). In practice this doesn't really matter that much since Mastodon is used primarily for microblogging and less for, well, actual blogging. If you were designing a more fully-featured social blogging platform like a Medium or Tumblr equivalent you'd probably want to put some more thought into that side of things.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#223
Fundamentally I've always been uncomfortable with the fact that Fediverse nodes aren't interchangeable in some critical ways - that your identity is tied to a single node, not the aggregate whole. This highlights why.

Having nodes control moderation and the like on traffic that originates in and flows through their node makes sense. Having your identity tied to a node has always seemed wrong to me.

edit: and to Ash, best wishes in taking care of your family in this difficult time. I imagine that giving up on your admin volunteer role was a very difficult decision but you did the right thing.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you’re going to stretch definitions like that “anytime soon” can go as far. It was a reasonable paraphrase

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#225
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, th…

I'm following so many accounts that if I don't sign in for three or four days I can barely keep up with my home feed. Almost all of it is interesting, funny, insightful or simply chill discussion. They almost exclusively use the Fediverse, none of them use the Fedi as a second-class citizen. Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother w…

Exactly. I use mastodon daily, I follow tons of people that do as well. Mastodon doesnt need to be massive or fulfill whatever growth expectations armchair tech entrepeneurs expect of social media platforms here. It just has to be reasonably easy to maintain and actually play an important role in people's lives and it is absolutely doing that.

Also, I put content warnings when I blab on about some tech thing because not everyone is a techy there. I am friends with lots of people there who will roll their eyes and walk away if you start blowing their timeline up with that kind of topic and you arent conscientious. It isn't just techies all hanging out with no reason to be there other then the tech novelty of it, it is a lot of peoples' home.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#226

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…

> Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will.

Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...

The Fediverse (or Federated Social Web as it was previously referred to in 2007[0] or so when it was first envisioned) will never close. Single installations may, but the network as a whole can not.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_So...

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#227

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.

Mastodon will probably die first because it's just a software but that's not a problem: ActivityPub, the protocol, and the Fediverse, the network, will most certainly outlast Twitter. Unless Twitter chooses to get compatible with the Fediverse.

A protocol can't die. People are still using IRC, XMPP, good ol' email, decades after they were created. They are still useful, they still work, so there is no reason for them to "die"

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#228
post #24

Earlier 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…

> 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. Do you mean that part of the protocol allows for a migration process that includes changing who your follows are pointing at? (assuming all servers involved are up to date and have this feature) I.e. did your account automatically start following your f…

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#229

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.

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.

Right. So what happened to UseNet-News? Would that not be an ideal federated platform with a standard protocol and everything?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#230
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech also doesn't help. It's a "typical" Rails application: large, convoluted, lot's of moving parts, and services, and generally slow as molasses (solved by throwing more hardware at it). As experienced Rails dev(ops), I managed to run and help run an instance, but it's not something done on a friday afternoon, let alone scale up. What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services. I'm thinking about…

> 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,…

You are right: managing a server is hard work. Thankless moderation mostly.

But that is even more reason to take away the additional work of keeping a large and convoluted rails-codebase up-to-date, running and performing.

Also, part of why moderation is such a giant task, is that in the fediverse, servers (instances) tend to be big. Huge even. It's far easier to manage a server that hosts your ten friends, or the 30 members of your alumni-club, or the 42 members at the local hackerspace than a server with 2000+ random users.

Another reason why lowering the barrier to the technical part of managing a server must be lowered.

Post reply on HN