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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#401

Post by somehnacct3757 »

mariusor wrote: post #372
somehnacct3757 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Empty calories in our information diet.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#402

Post by amadeuspagel »

smoldesu wrote: post #392
amadeuspagel wrote: post #391

The fundamental problem here is monetization, and the perfect solution is ads. Apparently this was discussed and rejected because people would instantly move to another server[1]. Not so. Ads on twitter don't bother me much, and ads on a mastodon server would give me some confidence that the server would stick around, and not beg me for money. Monetization with ads would also give people an incentive to market their…

If you start posting promoted content on a Mastodon server, many instances will immediately defederate with you and/or add you to Fediblock. It's fine if that's something you want to do, and there's nothing in the protocol that stops you from doing so, but everyone else will stop "being your friend" so-to-speak. That's probably why most people wanted to leave.

I'm talking about showing ads on the website, which is what's discussed in the github issue I linked, not pushing ads to federated instances.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#403

Post by smoldesu »

klabb3 wrote: post #302
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…

> Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with. I'm not a Mastodon user, but this is haunting. Just like shady data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds" are running VPN nodes, subreddits etc, this archi…

If this is a concern of yours, don't migrate your account. All instance admins play the role of Twitter CEO on Mastodon, which means (much like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, et. al) they can access all data you've trusted them with. The point of Mastodon is that it broke down these data silos, and give people more sane ownership models for social media. Your privacy concern is valid, but Mastodon doesn't advertise itself as a private protocol. A glorified microblogging platform doesn't really have a whole lot of data to leak besides maybe your DMs.

> We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it

That's called heterogenous encryption, and it's the technological equivalent of Mythril. End-to-end encryption doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data. In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account. These operators literally need to read your data to operate on it. I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here.

If you want to talk about architectures designed for malicious actors, you probably shouldn't start with distributed systems. Monolithic, profit-driven corporations like Twitter are much easier to tempt with salacious "data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds""

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#404

Post by Arathorn »

imdoor wrote: post #213
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…

I think you could create a system that's resilient to such issues even with federation (not saying it's easy, though), and Matrix actually has a solution in the works for this – decentralised user accounts [1]. And all of this makes me wonder – maybe it's better to re-implement something like Mastodon on top of Matrix. If Matrix adopts decentralised user accounts, that would seemingly solve such issues automatically…

We’re hoping to make progress on decentralised accounts on Matrix by the end of the year.

https://cerulean.matrix.org is another POC Matrix based Twitter clone (built for Jack & Parag) that demonstrates this (but without decentralised accounts yet).

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#405

Post by rakoo »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #365
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…

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.

That sounds very nice and I must admit I haven't made a lot of research on this topic. But today the major servers are still sold as a building block for an "inside" community. You browse instance that are categorized by interests.

Basically, the domain has much more significance than it really needs

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#406

Post by smoldesu »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #402
smoldesu wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you start posting promoted content on a Mastodon server, many instances will immediately defederate with you and/or add you to Fediblock. It's fine if that's something you want to do, and there's nothing in the protocol that stops you from doing so, but everyone else will stop "being your friend" so-to-speak. That's probably why most people wanted to leave.

I'm talking about showing ads on the website, which is what's discussed in the github issue I linked, not pushing ads to federated instances.

Oh, then I guess I don't really see what the problem is. It's a platform that lets you move your account freely, of course people are going to leave if you start smearing shit on the walls.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#407

Post by matthewdgreen »

rakoo wrote: post #227
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.

Mastodon will probably die first because it's just a software but that's not a problem: ActivityPub, the protocol, and the Fediverse, the network, will most certainly outlast Twitter. Unless Twitter chooses to get compatible with the Fediverse. A protocol can't die. People are still using IRC, XMPP, good ol' email, decades after they were created. They are still useful, they still work, so there is no reason for them…

Hey even gopher has 333 unique servers according to a recent census. But for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#408

Post by numpad0 »

twobitshifter wrote: post #308
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.

Rumors are that he plans to WeChatify twitter under X.com, so there’s more of a chance that twitter gets put under something larger and becomes neighbors with Square.

and then what? Twitter is one of those platform in which overeducated, depressed, insane and innocently malicious kids goes to deploy engineered narratives and absolutely unprofitably destructively dominate over people of all ages and identities. Normies has no place in it, and if anyone is going to change that, the platform just bleeds and eventually dies. It’s a 4.4chan-Lite. What comes of normalizing and integrating it into the society, even to Musk himself in short term?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#409

Post by vidarh »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #357
johnchristopher wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ?

Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogging platforms aren't trying to recreate these abusive systems. They don't show boost/favourite counts, don't offer paid promotion or adverts, don't have the manipulation of the timelines or the other abusive dark patterns used to keep people hooked on the toxic pipes. I feel that being able to show appreciation for a post, or send it to the people who are interested in you, are…

It does show boost/favourite counts once you open a toot, and just like on Twitter you can also click to see the list of people who have boosted/favourited

The other parts are true, but the "manipulation of timelines" is just a question of time because it's useful if you follow lots of people. As long as it remains opt-in and a setting it's a good thing. I'm planning an ActivityPub implementation for myself and "manipulation of timelines" is one of the features I want to add the most for my own use.

Point being that deviating from a strictly chronological timeline isn't the problem. Doing so in a non-transparent way the user has little control over is.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#410

Post by KoftaBob »

monkin wrote: post #67
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…

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…

This is why I view the "federated" form of decentralization to be more of an intermediate stop-gap between fully centralized and fully decentralized in the form of true P2P.

For a decentralized social network to be viable/sustainable (especially on the scale of something like Twitter), it has to be truly P2P, not federated on volunteer-run servers paid for through donations. That volunteer-run federated model is really only sustainable for smaller niche communities, not a global social network.

As of right now, the closest framework I can think of to handle something like this is a social network built on OrbitDB: https://github.com/orbitdb

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