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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#251

Post by mvanbaak »

monkin wrote: post #105
oogali wrote: 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.

in the last 20 years I have had more attacks on my email account and $whatever_current_social_network account then I had on my irc account. Things like nickserv and ip cloaks (which have been part of nearly all networks I used to connect to and those I connect to) do the job just fine. Is it easy to flood down a server, sure is, but if there's more then 1 hub on the network, things will settle pretty quickly normally.

In my opinion, the main reason why it was never adopted as a mainstream platform, is because it was never picked up by a big corp that saw a way to earn money off of it.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#252

Post by pessimizer »

asim wrote: post #43
samatman wrote: post #42

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…

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.

> it's hard to get everyone to run a distributed database, identity server, etc without it being some single binary.

Then it's a real problem that people keep doing these projects in Ruby and PHP. It was a problem that was ultimately laughed off when Diaspora chose it, and it's a problem that continues to linger and continues to be laughed off.

Make it a single-binary that uses a couple sqlite files in a ~/.directory, and people won't mind running their own server. They could opt to proxy their traffic through a caching intermediary, and we could still federate those caching intermediaries. Being a mule for social traffic could be a commodity service if social were standardized properly. Ideally, one would be able to flip a switch and adjust a few dials on one's own instance to become a caching intermediary for others.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#253

Post by EarlKing »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #151
EarlKing wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither does any point on the Fediverse. As long as operators think they can run their site any way they want instead of obeying a common protocol then they're federated in name only. To put it another way: If I can never trust that my email will make it to someone on gmail due to the opaqueness of their spam filters, with no way to be whitelisted by a recipient, then email has been thoroughly decommoditized and cent…

Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a…

"Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain obscene conduct.

I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#254

Post by rglullis »

jacooper wrote: post #231
rglullis wrote: post #11

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.

I need to understand this obsession with "getting discovered via the application itself".

I mean, what's the problem of using other means of communication to publish/promote your identity?

I am far from being internet famous, and I get at least one follower every week on Mastodon simply because I put it on my Twitter bio.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#255

Post by louky »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #229
howenterprisey wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm back on Usenet, and hey my 5 digit uid on /. Still works! Meta-moderation!

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#256

Post by anderspitman »

Thanks for your hard work Ash, and sorry to hear about your loved one.

As much as I love the Fediverse, I think the culture leans toward instances that are too big. I think the number of people on each instance should be much closer to 1 than 1000.

The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for end-to-end encryption.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#257

Post by seydor »

Weakness of running a decentralized service: no money made, which means you have to give and keep on giving. The solution is to decentralize the hosting itself instead of leeching off the work of a few individuals. Mastodon credentials should use something like a bittorrent/blockchain db. It s ok to lose the posts

Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#258

Post by i5heu »

mattdesl wrote: post #174

That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to another person. Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO. - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance. - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator. - People don't want to self-host. Th…

> - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.

you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work

> - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.

There is no "private data" on mastodon, I think it gets communicated enough that admins will have access to direct massages. it even says to you "Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon."

if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;)

> - People don't want to self-host.

True MOST ppl don't want to host, but they are a few that like it and even get money for providing a public service. So I don't have to host smth, I just have to find someone hosting it.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#259

Post by andreyk »

As per my comment in reply to monkin, I keep wondering why there isn't an open source website that makes it (almost) as easy to setup a fediverse instance as it is to create a Discord or a subreddit. Surely it's possible for a service to have a nice frontend UI for easy administration by non-technical users, while at the backend dealing with the technical API calls to cloud providers to make it all happen?

This sort of website would be incredibly light weight (just API calls, no data storage), and the users would not be tied down to it; as long as they retain ownership of the login credentials to whatever cloud provider they choose, even if this front end shuts down the fediverse instance won't. And if it's open source, it would be easy to migrate to another such 'frontend management' website.

I have thought about this quite a bit, and it seems like a great idea - is there something I am missing (aside from it perhaps being nontrivial to set up a Fediverse instance via API calls to cloud providers)?

Of course, a clear issue is that there would still be (small) ongoing costs even for tiny instances, so it would not be the same as Discord or reddit in terms of having a 'free tier'. But the pitch of a 'personalized social media website' seems like a pretty cool idea and i'd be willing to pay a bit to try it out.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#260

Post by anaganisk »

mattdesl wrote: post #174

That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to another person. Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO. - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance. - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator. - People don't want to self-host. Th…

So it boils down to purchasing an NFT to participate, if yes, I’m not sure how long it will last. I’ve been trying to get a namespace on ENS since forever, and no payment processor wants me to buy eth. If that itself is a major hurdle I’m not sure how people will ever join.
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