Mastodon.technology Shutdown • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#371

Post by olah_1 » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:47 PM UTC

i5heu wrote: post #258

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 Mast…

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

Maybe 2 minutes for the technical side, then 2 months of getting all your old followers to follow you at your new address.

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

Or use a different protocol...

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#372

Post by mariusor » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #355

mariusor wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your perspective on "empty calories" social engagement is very narrow in my opinion, because you seem to equate all social interactions by the measure of existing, objectively bad, services. I think that over time the rise of small indie servers that will work on a social graph but in a similar way to email, will prove that "meaningful" social networks can exist, and my personal hope is that they won't be focusing on…

My position is that anonymous conversation is low value and a more advanced internet society will not do it much. The "meaningful" social networks you theorize will be meaningful specifically because anonymous conversation is absent. If someone posts something interesting I'll DM them about it somehow because I'll know them well enough to do that. Replying on Twitter is the equivalent of sending Reply-All emails to t…

Yet here we are doing just fine having that anonymous conversation. It won't change your life, but I bet you found out a thing or two from this thread.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#373

Post by berkes » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

insane_dreamer wrote: post #269

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…

Would a pre-installed docker image be a solution to the setup issue? (Doesn't solve performance, of course.)

Not really. As I mentioned in my comment, it might make it easier, but not simpler.

For one, maintenance, probably becomes harder even. And it won't be "a docker image", but a docker-network (-compose, k8s or such) because running requires not just a single service, but a webserver (https), runners (async workers), redis, postgresql, elasticsearch, file-storage and so on. You'd need some 4 to 8 images all interconnected to run it. And secondly, docker isn't omnipresent. I can't just copy a binary into /usr/bin , run it. I'll need docker, networking, docker-knowledge, logging, monitoring and so on.

More so: if a docker is a solution to the setup of complex piece of server-software, than certainly docker is a solution to the setup of a simple piece of server-software.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#374

Post by mariusor » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

andreyk wrote: post #259

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…

It doesn't fully match your requirements, but an easy way to setup a mastodon instance is https://masto.host/ Does that help?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#375

Post by mariusor » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:57 PM UTC

Xeoncross wrote: post #154

detaro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think "encryption at rest" is what you want, because it doesn't help you against the admin if the app still can/has to be able to decrypt it? Encryption at rest protects against someone walking away with the database, not an admin.

Encryption isn't mentioned once in the whole Activity Pub spec. Encryption at rest isn't good enough. E2E should be the default on federated protocols with breakouts for public content only needing to be signed.

ActivityPub is a transport protocol. The content of an ActivityPub object can be anything, including a stream of bytes coming from an E2E encrypted exchange.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#376

Post by micromacrofoot » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

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…

Myspace still hasn't shut down

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#377

Post by noirscape » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 7:00 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #190

noirscape wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There's also a couple of PR reasons to not want to associate with him, but those are largely off-topic. They're more than PR reasons if you're one of his "wrong sorts"; personally, I'm not confident trusting (for practical reasons) or comfortable using (for emotional reasons) a piece of software whose MDfL doesn't think I should exist. It's probably off-topic for this discussion, but it's important to keep in mind…

I do agree with you completely there, it's just that HN doesn't tend to take well to pointing out that particular stripe of awfulness and that makes it a non-starter as a reason.

He's definitely a case where I would broadly recommend marginalized groups to stay far away from his tooling if they are planning on interacting with the development team in any way. The man is an demagogue (and openly proud of it) and an understated element to his bad behavior in co-operating with others is that it's in part driven by that demagoguery (just reference the blogpost in the previous comment and how much of it is dedicated to crying about "cancel culture" where the reality is really just that he was an asshole to people and they showed him the door[1], very little about it had to do with his (IMO shitty) opinions.

As far as software choices go; Fully agreed, although I always recommend people to not just go by public reputation and to always investigate before making a decision (in the case of Soapbox, you'll notice I linked both the developers resignation post and the post that caused relations with him and other maintainers to seriously start souring, so that one can make their own assessment).

Pleroma for example got initially accused of being developed by neonazis due to an early instance modifying their source code to ignore incoming message privacy flags, everything was just set to be on the public timeline, all of the time. It's in reality completely wrong; in fact numerous developers to the software have been rather staunchly anti-fascist even since its very beginning, but that wasn't known by the public so the reputation of the project got tarred for years. Similarly, one admin blamed not removing hateful content on not having the tools, again, completely wrong, but then Pleroma got tarred with "not having basic moderation tools", even though it ironically has the must fine-grained moderation tools compared to anything else out there (you can literally write your own bit of code to automatically moderate and integrate it in the software itself if you wanted to).

Finally when it comes to users submitting bugs: with the fediverse that usually doesn't actually directly go to the developer but instead lands at the feet of the instance maintainer, who makes the decision on whether or not to report it to the developers community. There's a certain sense of connection, but it's usually not as deeply tied as one would think.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1357/

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#378

Post by berkes » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

mariusor wrote: post #359

rakoo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel like matrix solves a different problem, I believe that ActivityPub and Matrix can coexist. Honestly the very late game plan for the projects I'm working on is to be able gather under a single umbrella a suite of opensource applications to create a meta social network pod that can be easily launched in a similar way to Google apps on a custom domain (ActivityPub and Matrix for a starters). I think there could b…

I'm working on flockingbird.social, a "linkedin for the fediverse"[1].

Aside from a job-search bot, I haven't written many software, and it looks like what you are working on might actually be a very solid foundation. It's a pity my go isn't that established (rust and ruby here) but certainly will consider this going forward. Huddling around common base libraries is also certainly something the fediverse needs, rather than re-building AP again in "language X".

[1] The hardest part has proven to be the fact that "linkedin" is an entirely different product depending on who you ask. It solves entirely different solutions, depending on who you ask. And it has entirely different features, depending on who you ask. Turns out LinkedIn is quite hard to "copy", "port" or even define for the fediverse. Aside from that this makes it a giant task to do. Is it a place to find jobs? To recruit? To keep in touch with colleagues? To connect with other entrepeneurs? To spam lame motivational quotes? To pitch your book or a Rolodex-on-steroids? Its all of that and more.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#379

Post by mariusor » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 7:02 PM UTC

thrdbndndn wrote: post #72

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?

IMHO, its decentralized nature just isn't compatible with most user, or the concept of social media. It works for certain demographics but not most.

I bet the numbers of email users is larger than the individual ones for each social network. (a quick search says that the number of email accounts is estimated at ~4billion, and the most populous "social network", TikTok has an estimated at ~1billion users)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#380

Post by berkes » Fri, Oct 07, 2022, 7:07 PM UTC

riffic wrote: post #329

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…

> There are plenty of other choices. There's even WordPress, with a plugin. A lot of ~~people~~ entities such as companies, organizations, etc have a WordPress site. edit: Pretend this site supports basic formatting in comments?

I know this exists. As does NextCloud. But what solution or use-case does it serve? I honestly cannot see it. Neither for WP nor for NC.

ActivityPub is -aside from a protocol- something that is designed for social networking mostly. How does "adding a WP plugin" help? Why would I want to connect my blog or website to this fediverse? Is it just so people can get my blogposts in their timeline? Because that's the only use-case I can see, and that problem is easily solved with RSS (and a bot).