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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#291

Post by csa »

sam1r wrote: post #262
m3kw9 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events, you shouldn’t avoid doing something just because there could be a small chance of death(not walking out side to avoid a meteor strike). Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.

>> Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events. Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example hypothetical “black swan” events?

Not op, but…:

- Multiple C-suite executives and board members get caught up in a Jeffrey Epstein level underage sex and sex trafficking ordeal. They resist when busted, and it becomes a spectacle. The evidence is just messy enough and the group is just tight-lipped enough that the legal parts of the case take a long time. In the mean time, Twitter loses users who voice their objection via not giving Twitter its attention and moves on to an up-and-coming competitor.

- The US elects a group of politicians who have authoritarian leanings (note that these could be extremists from either side of the politic spectrum, imho). This group of people lose power in legitimate elections. Via various levels of chicanery that revolve around undermining the spirit if not the law around the US election system, this group makes it so that they are able remain in power. Once they’ve started down that slippery slope, they just rewrite the laws so that they stay in power permanently. This group clamps down on free speech. The powers that be at Twitter object. A puppet leader loyal to the leading party is installed in order to manage Twitter out of existence, with a state-controlled competitor being supported in its place.

- The US is successfully overtaken in war by another country. The powers that be at Twitter allow for speech against the occupiers. Twitter is shut down.

- Twitter is found to have facilitated genocide in a foreign country (e.g., Myanmar), and the public revolts. To be honest, this will probably be overlooked, but I thought I would put it here as a thought exercise.

Part of the problem with hypothetical black swan events is that they seem entirely impossible… until they happen. That’s why they are black swan events.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#292

Post by Kye »

ineptech wrote: post #211
monkin wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

> 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…

Anyone can just pay $6/month to the good folks at masto.host to manage one for them. It's enough for them and possibly a few friends. I don't know if there are any other managed Mastodon companies, but this one has been around for years and has a good reputation. Their managed instances also meet the joinmastodon.org listing requirements by default.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#293

Post by [deleted] »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #28

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…

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#294

Post by mfer »

teraflop wrote: post #284
mfer wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. People who aren't looking to make a profit (or even break even) means they are running a social media platform while funding it through some other means. What is that means of making money? What pays for the hosting and the time spent doing ops? You can't take money out of the equation because you have hosting costs at th…

"Trying to be self-funding" and "trying to make a profit" are very different things, and it doesn't make sense to conflate them. Even though funding wasn't the primary focus of this blog post, it seems to make it quite clear where the money was coming from: https://www.patreon.com/ashfurrow

Money was obviously an issue. $319 USD/month didn't cover the costs of running it. As noted in the post, "I’ve donated countless hours".

Where is the line between "trying to make a profit" and "trying to be self-funding"?

Trying to be funded off of donations is really hard and rarely works. Most of the time you need other funding models.

If someone runs a biz where they run mastadon instances and the business breaks even (or just a little more) is that making a profit?

How does an organization behind an instance make money to cover expenses? This has to be looked at.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#295

Post by johnchristopher »

> I want to give you as much time as possible to download your data and migrate to a new server.

Does it mean you can download your messages and put them back in the global conversation ? How does that work ? Are those messages stored only on one instance ? Do they disappear forever when an instance disappears ? Will users switch to new identity from another instance and import messages or is this lost ?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#296

Post by mynameisvlad »

noirscape wrote: post #56
knewter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox is a frontend that works atop either mastodon, pleroma, or the rebased backend 2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better maintained than pleroma

I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a technical decision he forced through after it was deemed to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch of alternate endpoints…

As a complete outsider who thrives on drama, everyone sucks here.

Alex has shit opinions, 100%. But the back and forths in the Pleroma MRs linked are at the level of high school catty drama. And that applies to everyone in there, on both sides. I feel like every single MR listed would have gone completely differently if the people involved treated the others as humans and actually worked towards building better software. At the end of the day, the commits were simple enough and could have been worked on had the people there actually wanted to do that. But instead they all just turned into name-calling high school kids. In short, everyone there needs to grow up.

And while I agree that a one man shop in the form of Soapbox is likely not going to last, I wouldn’t put my support in for Pleroma based on what I read either.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#297

Post by Griffinsauce »

oogali wrote: post #95
monkin wrote: post #67

Earlier 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…

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…

Besides the other comments, was this anywhere near the same scale?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#298

Post by petesergeant »

vinaypai wrote: post #243
petesergeant wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true of Facebook, but I can see Twitter receiving a fatal blow if the Musk acquisition goes through.

There's a lot to dislike about Elon Musk (mostly related to his lack of filter) but he has founded multiple successful companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars each. It's possible he'll somehow make twitter worse than it is and starts hemorrhaging users, but if I had to choose I'd bet on Twitter ending up in a better place than it is now.

Mr Musk is unambiguously both brilliant and a complete ass, and I think people who underestimate him or lionise him are both wrong.

That said, I think he is buying Twitter for the lulz / weird libertarian reasons, rather than making a real business out of it, and I have serious concerns it will injure what is currently a public utility absolutely beyond repair.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#299

Post by johnchristopher »

shadowgovt wrote: post #162

A major note in the Mastodon fediverse brought down by the fact that it's administered by one person who, despite the fact they are running a social network node, never built up the real world trust connections to find somebody they could share the toil of administration with or tap in when it was time for them to bow out because we are all mortal. The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. T…

> The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems.

This is something that perplexed me when Mastodon and Diaspora and others appeared: why would you want to recreate/mimic the toxicity of FB and Twitter ? The resharing, the upvotes, etc. If social networks all have the seeds of their defaults, why clone it ?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#300

Post by blep_ »

guywithahat wrote: post #235
tootie wrote: 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

Do you have examples?
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