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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#441

Post by dredmorbius »

remram wrote: post #184
noasaservice wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes when communities die or are killed, they don't come back. Nobody knows where to go to re-convene.

This is different because mastodon.technology will keep operating until December 1st. This leaves them plenty of time to organize a move by discussing it on the platform like they always have. They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.

One of the huge problems with on-platform discussions is ... that the discussion itself dies with the platform, and any decisions or announcements disappear with it.

At the same time, based on my own personal experience, it is absolutely impossible to get people to move to another platform or service even for the purpose of discussing future plans.

My exceedingly strong advice is to have multiple points of presence defined as a matter of course, one of which should be a simple email list (which provides persistent contact information), regardless of any awareness of an impending platform shutdown.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#442

Post by brazzy »

ndriscoll wrote: post #301
naavis wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For reference, based on quick Googling, Twitter publishes around 10 000 tweets per second on average.

i.e. my laptop could handle the write load. A retired nerd with a real server they put in a data center for bandwidth could easily run that level of traffic on 2022 hardware. For reference my work laptop (8 logical cores, so 4+HT? 32GB RAM) can handle 100k rows/second sustained inserts into postgres 14 with some batch jobs I'm working on. You can buffer http requests into batches and easily handle way more than 10k/s…

Yeah, you have not the faintest clue what you're talking about.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#443

Post by dredmorbius »

throwaway-jim wrote: post #52

will they be able to migrate their profiles?

Yes, mostly.

Mastodon supports both migrating your profile (followers and block lists, as well as metadata, but NOT content), AND exporting your content (posts, replies, and media uploads).

The process is pretty straightforward, and I've done this myself. You will lose your old content's persistent URL references, though federated copies of that content may still be accessible from other instances.

See:

Moving or leaving accounts: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>

It's also possible to move an entire instance to a new machine:

Migrating to a new machine: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/>

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#444

Post by dredmorbius »

blep_ wrote: post #300
guywithahat wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Current Affairs recently ran "NPR Is Not Your Friend", which highlights some of the issues:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-frien...>

The upshot of that piece is that NPR itself remains part of the neoliberal ideological propaganda apparatus:

Like all press outlets, NPR has a particular point of view. Its bias is just as profound as the likes of MSNBC or Fox News. NPR’s ideological bias is toward what we might call the American bipartisan consensus.

My sense is that both NPR and Wikipedia have performed admirably, and far better than their commercial counterparts, but that there remain pitfalls with both any organisation and those which are based on nonprofit / NGO models, particularly in terms of sponsor / donor capture.

The NonProfit Quarterly's podcast Tiny Spark frequently discusses such issues. It seems to be on hiatus but its back-catalogue has numerous episodes dedicated to the topic:

https://nonprofitquarterly.org/tiny-spark/>

One of the voices heard several times on that topic has been Rob Reich of Stanford (not to be confused with former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, at UC Berkeley), who's written and spoken on issues of philanthropy. Several articles are listed in his ... Wikipedia ... bio:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reich#Articles>

I suspect that the OP had another take on this, which I find less credible.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#445

Post by seydor »

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?

This has been a massive problem with everything since PHP stopped being popular. Wordpress is easy even for a layperson to setup

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#446

Post by danuker »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #407
rakoo wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead.

It has a very small community. That is very different from being dead - in fact, that community is probably much more passionate about what makes it specific than a large community.

For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#447

Post by thrown_22 »

remram wrote: post #189
thrown_22 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>racism and porn. That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.

And let's not act like Twitter isn't full of those to this day ...

They're getting rid of the porn ... so people are leaving.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#448

Post by SyndicWill »

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…

Our pay-what-you-can cooperative Mastodon instance at social.coop, running strong for over 5 years, is currently debating what to do with our 10,000€ budget surplus.

The idea that social media costs more to operate than people would be willing to pay is false. It's propaganda from the people who profit from keeping you trapped in their closed networks to monetize your attention.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#449

Post by 3371 »

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.

Yes, but why did you ask? I suppose that's exactly one of the reasons why fediverse users want to choose who they trust, isn't it?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#450

Post by jron »

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…

Do you have plans to add comment functionality to littr.me/go-littr?
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