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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#451

Post by assetlabel »

petesergeant wrote: post #198
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.

That’s true of Facebook, but I can see Twitter receiving a fatal blow if the Musk acquisition goes through.

I think Twitter will become better when everybody who left for Gab, Mastodon, Gettr, Truth social, etc, all come back. Conversations that are more representative of what the public actually thinks (no matter how much you might hate what they say) are more useful than echo chambers.

I can't predict what Musk will do, but I'm under the distinct impression he's trying to allow free speech for everybody, get rid of bots, improve the tech (allow editing a tweet), and potentially hold people to account better by not allowing (or deranking) anonymous accounts. There's also leaked chat with Jack Dorsey about making an open interoperable protocol. Twitter would not die if it opened it's protocol and federated. As a public company that would destroy the ability to profit, but as a private company he can do that.

I have a lot of faith in Elon based on past results. He already solved the problem of people who don't believe in climate change - he got them to buy electric cars because they are sexy. Brilliant man.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#452

Post by WorldMaker »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #14

This is why I haven't gotten into mastodon. What server do I choose? At best they're internet forums from the 90s where the admin eventually has to move on (for often valid reasons, like in this case.) Also why does this random guy have MY data? Why does he need to trust a new admin with my data for a succession plan to be possible? I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed. Mastodon federated at the wrong gra…

> I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed.

Where do you host your blog?

If all you are doing is consuming blogs then yeah RSS is a lot easier than choosing a Mastodon instance.

But if all you want is to just consume Mastodon, you can do that with RSS too. Almost every public profile in Mastodon has an RSS feed that's easy to discover (and most auto-discovery tools will do it for you).

The complication, just as with Blogs come from when you want to post. With RSS you still have to pick a blog host. Do you pick one of the big name cloud hosts like Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, or Medium.com? Do you pick a smaller host or self-host? If that, which blogging software or static site generator do you want?

Mastodon federated at the exact "same" granularity as RSS, it's just that generally more people assume they will post on Mastodon today (and more people have private/semi-private feeds) rather than just only consume public feeds. Choosing an instance is exactly like choosing a blog host. There are the big giant instances that are easier to get started but you "own" less control of them. There are the small community instances. There are instance hosting providers. There are plenty of opportunities to self-host if you have the technical determination. There are even multiple software options to consider: Mastodon, Pleroma, Mastodon-forks like Hometown, Pixelfed, and many more (those are just the ones off the top of my head that federate with the ActivityPub "Fediverse").

Trusting an instance admin is just like trusting a blog hosting provider. They have "your data" because you've asked them to host it for you.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#453

Post by 3371 »

seti0Cha wrote: post #399
INTPenis wrote: post #318

I'm going to be frank, as a long time federated node admin. In the last few years I've seen so many admins act just like Ash. They have a huge heart and a lot of passion for federation. So they open their doors to thousands of users. And I keep thinking that it's just not sustainable. I've worked in ops for over 20 years, I feel like that background has given me a healthy scepticism and a respect for Murphy's law. So…

How hard is it to get connected to other instances? Is this done through personal relationships or prior history or can a complete outsider get involved? I know exactly zero people using Mastodon (that I'm aware of) but this sounds interesting and makes me want to try to set something up.

From my very little experience, you can search for anyone in any instance as long as it's federating with the whole network.

The actual problem is... to know the person. There are no more suggestions from algorithms and no more million-followers accounts that you usually heard of, you need to dig to find people you find interesting.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#455

Post by abustamam »

wan_ala wrote: post #430
anderspitman wrote: post #256

Thanks for your hard work Ash, and sorry to hear about your loved one. As much as I love the Fediverse, I think the culture leans toward instances that are too big. I think the number of people on each instance should be much closer to 1 than 1000. The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure th…

Honestly I think some big issues are that not everyone has a fast machine thats going to be up all the time to host the instance. It would be cool to implement something like BitTorrent but for websites.

Isn't that what IPFS aims to be?

https://ipfs.io/

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#456

Post by 0x457 »

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…

I think you don't understand that 10,000 tweets isn't 10,000 inserts. It's not enough to just write tweet, you need to fan-out writes to every user's feed. It's also not batched into neat transactions like your batch jobs.

You have no idea what are you talking about.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#457

Post by 0x457 »

KoftaBob wrote: post #410
monkin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 real…

Fully p2p doesn't really work well either. For a fully p2p network, nodes will have to hold the entire data.

Now first storage space taken will be ridiculous, and then you will be hosting content you don't want to host because it could be straight up illegal in your country.

Look at any crypto-blockchain and count how many full-nodes vs thin-nodes are running in networks.

Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#458

Post by ndriscoll »

0x457 wrote: post #456
ndriscoll wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you don't understand that 10,000 tweets isn't 10,000 inserts. It's not enough to just write tweet, you need to fan-out writes to every user's feed. It's also not batched into neat transactions like your batch jobs. You have no idea what are you talking about.

You don't need to fan out writes to feeds. Users subscribe to other users, not tweets. You can attempt to send out the notification to subscribed users, and if it fails, that's fine. You don't need to record notification status. Have a worker that records (in the db) the last tweet id it's processed, and just regularly joins N new tweets to authors to subscribers and attempts to send. You can play with how that query works to limit total work done in a chunk rather than N new tweets (in case of someone with many subscribers), but the idea is straightforward.

You can easily batch writes into neat transactions: make a queue, have your POST handler write (row, callback) onto the queue and await the callback. Have the queue reader grab a chunk, push it to the db in batch, and execute all of the callbacks on commit. The callbacks return a 200 to the client, or 500 if the commit failed. This can all happen fast enough to be done in "real time" (however fast you want your queue worker to flush batches).

You can do all of this in a couple dozen lines of code with something like Scala/ZIO.

Computationally, it is totally doable. The biggest constraint is the cost of storage.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#459

Post by zeroxp »

wmf wrote: post #335
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 ?

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

Social media inevitably becomes a reflection of the users, and humans all have a thread of toxicity running through them.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#460

Post by fleg »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #68
fleg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moving to another instance is pretty easy: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration It doesn't move your toots, but followers don't have to do anything to still follow you on your new account.

> It doesn't move your toots does that even count as migrating then

I think yes, but if you really want, then you can migrate your toots by exporting them from the old instance and importing on the new one: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...
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