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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#331

Post by systemvoltage »

barkingcat wrote: post #325
cmeacham98 wrote: post #44

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.

Once the twitter sale is completed, the new owner of twitter can chose whatever they want to do with it, including shutting it down - which in this milleu would be something that the buyer of twitter will consider doing just for LOL's. imagine the trolling potential of a rolling outage of twitter or ooops "new owner" deleted the database as a joke. Or replace all twitter profiles with sayings from Doge. before you sa…

Curious though, mastadadon owners can potentially be like that too, no? And stakes are too low to do mischief with mastadon vs. Twitter.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#332

Post by shadowfacts »

rvz wrote: post #75
k__ wrote: post #6

What do you think is the main issue with Mastodon not really getting mainstream adoption? Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it? Not enough marketing? Bad UX?

All of the above, plus little to no-one actually bothered to use it daily, with not enough users to even talk to and compared to Twitter, Mastodon has an extremely limited network effect. This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.

Lots of people use it every day: myself, the people I follow, a lot of people who follow me, countless others I don’t interact with. Yes, the network has few users compared to twitter, but it’s a far cry from “little to no-one”.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#333

Post by 5560675260 »

ephbit wrote: post #218
5560675260 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Somehow this usecase completely eluded me when I've sought about how easy it is to setup a way for publishing updates / receiving updates from people you're subscribed to. I can't think of a way for getting content from random commenters in a discussion with a passive RSS-like subscription. At least not without forcing OP to host links to everyone's comments, or involving a third party.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#334

Post by Kye »

ephbit wrote: post #218
5560675260 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Used to be people would follow blogs through RSS as people made posts, response posts, etc. The quality of discussion was much higher.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#335

Post by wmf »

johnchristopher wrote: post #299
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 ?

Coming up with "non-toxic" social media is extremely difficult and probably not something programmers can solve.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#336

Post by rakoo »

mariusor wrote: post #131
berkes wrote: 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…

> What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services. I'm working on exactly that: a service that acts as an ActivityPub server (code[1], example[2], example application running on top of it[3]) for users in the form of a static binary. It supports multiple storage backends that can be selected individually or all together at build time and it can be extended to many more. [1] https://github.com/go-ap/fedb…

This is exactly what we need. The current landscape of Fediverse is too young: every application involves both functionality, identity and community. So you don't really join a network, but you join a specific community using a specific medium. You can't join multiple communities (ie follow multiple instances): you have to create multiple accounts, you can't follow a full instance but only individual instances. You can't have microblogging and forums from the same account, because they are different applications, so they are different accounts. You can't mix functionalities beyond the most basic, because they are not thought out together.

What we need is an AP store, and then applications build on top of it, like your project does. But at this point I question whether matrix wouldn't be a better platform

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#337

Post by mattl »

k__ wrote: post #324
mattl wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also less about my friends being on Twitter and more about the people who aren't my friends being on Twitter too...

Yes, so probably a marketing thing.

I see few communities outside of open source and adjacent being interested in Mastodon because it’s hard to find the people there.

Even a technology related post will get much bigger reception on Twitter.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#338

Post by guelo »

petesergeant wrote: post #298
vinaypai wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's buying it for the same reason all other billionaires buy media outlets, to be able to push their narrative onto the public consciousness. Social media isn't what users post, it's which user posts the algorithm decides to show. For someone with a conglomerate with many interests and huge ambition, owning popular media can be very profitable even if the media outlet itself isn't.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#339

Post by barkingcat »

systemvoltage wrote: post #331
barkingcat wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once the twitter sale is completed, the new owner of twitter can chose whatever they want to do with it, including shutting it down - which in this milleu would be something that the buyer of twitter will consider doing just for LOL's. imagine the trolling potential of a rolling outage of twitter or ooops "new owner" deleted the database as a joke. Or replace all twitter profiles with sayings from Doge. before you sa…

Curious though, mastadadon owners can potentially be like that too, no? And stakes are too low to do mischief with mastadon vs. Twitter.

of course! but my reply was to answer "claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable."

which is ... truly laughable if you like doge?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#340

Post by varispeed »

Huge respect. My friend is running a forum (I know madness today) and he is totally sick of it, but has no heart to close it nor trust someone will be able to take over given it is losing money (people - assuming "competition" - were posting adult content and then reporting to Google, so advertising eventually got turned off and other advert providers don't pay enough to keep the lights on).
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