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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

231–240 of 604 posts

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#231

On the one hand, I am sad to hear about it and even more so due to the circumstances. On the other, I feel a bit validated in my belief that we need to have professionally managed instances on the fediverse. "Community Support" only goes so far. Thousands of people using a service, but how many of them actually help with its upkeep? I know that my instance has only a handful of paying users, and it is barely paying f…

Well if only having your own server on Mastodon was realistic, instead its totally impossible to get discovered.

There is fix for this, which is Fedverse Relays, but guess what ? Mastodons official servers don't use them.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#232
post #210

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.

>He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part. I don't think it was a deliberate misquote of gp to manipulate readers. Instead, the "anytime soon" was responding to gp's exact statement of : "We'll find out soon enough."

I understood this as soon enough after they close.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#233

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…

> f*c*book

Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of using M$ Instead of Microsoft?

Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

f*c*book has been floundering for some years now and is lurching from trying to follow one trend to the next, pouring money into each attempt and everything twitter seems to do causes another exodus. They'll be brought out and then hollowed out, or attempt a major pivot which will be fatal for their global relevance. This is without the spectre of data protection laws offering us more and more protection from the abu…

why are you censoring facebook?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#235
post #34

The solution to silicon valley hegemony just isn't decentralization. It's non-profit leadership. Think Wikipedia. Think NPR. The model doesn't even really need to change from an ad-based revenue model so long as there isn't a bullwhip at the backs of execs demands grow or die. Just keep revenue as close to break even as possible with enough cushion for a downturn.

I don't think Wikipedia and NPR have aged that well though, there are lots of topics where they're essentially (or literally) paid propaganda for their major donors and because they're a non-profit it's less clear what's what than if they had paid advertisements

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Of course not. It's on the Internet. I don't have a problem with furries, people with bias or kinks. What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?…

> What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment? If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're using gains a reputation accordingly. > And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on. Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a federation. You have, at best, a gathering…

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#237
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's the best example to be honest.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#238

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…

> 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. How do you vet applicants? Depending on the theme of the site, this seems like it might range from easy (gardening, cooking, ...) to excruciating (politics, medical).

"My server, my rules" really is very easy.

A lot often is just a simple matter of "if I don't like you, I won't give you access, or retrospectively kick you off". And the other side is that if you, as user don't like that, there are thousands of other instances to choose from. And if none are good enough for you, you can run your own.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#239
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.

> An invitation-only Mastodon network

It's not the network that is invitation-only. Just some servers on that network that are. The network itself is entirely permission-less.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#240
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…

Who pays for Twitter ?

Who said anything about the Fediverse having to be free ?

There is absolutely no doubt that should Twitter die, if no single actor can emerge quickly enough, for-profit actors will emerge and they will have all good reasons to be compatible with something that already exists. There will be mega large instances paid by siphoning data and with ads, there will be large instances paid by users/funds/donations, there will be small, community instances. Maybe HN will have its own instance; how much do you pay for HN today ?

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