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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#361

Post by seti0Cha »

rvz wrote: post #268
proactivesvcs wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions. Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy' especially when they occasionally run back to Twitter since they know little social engagement goes on Mastodon.…

> Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy'

That's not at all true. Account activity follows the Pareto principle. It's not at all unusual for any online service to have a large number of inactive users. Perhaps it's different for Twitter, but considering I've probably signed up for it three times and use it approximately never, I'm skeptical.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#362

Post by MiscIdeaMaker99 »

rvz wrote: post #119
arcatech wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Do you have some kind of personal issue with the protocol? There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.

> 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…

What exactly has Mastadon failed to do?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#363

Post by proactivesvcs »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #3

> The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I always suspected this would be a massive problem with Mastodon. I contemplated running a server, but there's no way to know beforehand when you'll be running into a limit, like cost or time. Can you really build a social network on volunteers that invest their own money and time, with little reward?

The Fediverse isn't just Mastodon, and there are other microblogging platforms. Epicyon is designed to be a lightweight server: https://libreserver.org/epicyon/

"Epicyon is a fediverse server suitable for self-hosting a small number of accounts on low power systems."

In a testament to how the Fediverse really does Just Work, I stumbled across Bob, the developer, quite by accident from my Mastodon account and now follow him. His posts, from his Epicyon instance, appear just like anyone else on my home feed and we interact as if he lived on my home server. There are at least half a dozen people I interact with who aren't on Mastodon, either.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#364

Post by proactivesvcs »

berkes wrote: post #39
noirscape wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in ter…

I'm aware of Pleroma, but didn't mention it because I find that allthough it's easier than mastodon, it hardly is simpler. And being easier, IMO, isn't enough. The focus of pleroma is very much on the "lightweight" part. Which is good, bc that also desparately needs a solution. But we really need something that is all of it: easy, simple and lightweight. Not just easier and lightweight.

Epicyon might be worth a look: https://libreserver.org/epicyon/

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#365

Post by proactivesvcs »

rakoo wrote: post #336
mariusor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

Some clients allow you to pin the public timeline of another instance. As for spreading beyond your home server, tags are key. With the right client, or the Mastodon web UI in advanced mode you can pin a series of tags as its own timeline, which updates in real time, so you can follow discussions of interests, grouped together, with results from across the Fediverse.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#366

Post by riffic »

MiscIdeaMaker99 wrote: post #362
rvz wrote: 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…

What exactly has Mastadon failed to do?

This user's been on HN for a while repeating this ad nauseam.

https://www.google.com/search?q=rvz+mastodon+failure+site:ht...

I wouldn't engage.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#367

Post by asim »

pessimizer wrote: post #252
asim wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is sort of like the ideal and I think after ruby and php moving on to a new language that can compile down to a self executable makes sense. Whether it's rust or Go to whatever else doesn't matter as much as just taking a new shot at writing something that works.

I half heartedly look at one of my own projects written in Go and wonder if it would fit the criteria but still some work to do. At the end of the day most people don't want to run anything and those that do end up with pages of documentation and maintenance burden.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#368

Post by gnull »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #44
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…

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.

I wouldn't claim Twitter will shut down soon, but one could argue that mastodon is more robust because it's divirsified.

There's no single person on earth who can shut down Mastodon, so Mastodon dies only if this decision is made massively by many people (or if development stops, but then still nothing will stop the server I run on raspberry pi in my bedroom). Twitter otoh can be shut down by one person for a whole multitude of reasons without any concern for the opinion of users.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#369

Post by gnull »

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.

Who are mastodon owners?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#370

Post by zo1 »

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.

I don't think we can just assume that "reliable" is a globally agreed property to judge alternatives. That property is something that came about and on some level spoiled users. Because for commercial social network providers any downtime meant a loss of users, eyeballs, and most importantly money.
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