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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#471

Post by xani_ »

assetlabel wrote: post #451
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.

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,…

Twitter is terrible medium for conversation in the first place so unless musky boi decides to completely reengineer it I doubt that would happen

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#472

Post by xani_ »

EarlKing wrote: post #134
proactivesvcs wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to look very hard to find screaming racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular biases and kinks. Of course not. It's on the Internet. I don't have a problem with furries, people with bias or kinks. What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?…

> What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment? If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're using gains a reputation accordingly. > And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on. Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a federation. You have, at best, a gathering…

> You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.

That's not incompatible. You can go anywhere you want but you can get banned from place if you're an ass there is entirely sensible way for federated network to work.

More than that, it's necessary if you want any resistance to bad actors

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#473

Post by banku_brougham »

j_k_eter wrote: post #66
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.

I find the idea that X won't / can't happen on a 3 month timeline, in this political climate, silly. Is there such a thing as stability bias? Because folks had best recalibrate their expectations for rate of change, starting a few months ago. I won't be taking any bets on Facebook, but the thing I'm replying to sounds like 6-months ago thinking.

Great point. Not long ago, it was not commonly imagined that large nuclear reactors anywhere in the world would be on the border of moving front lines between warring armored forces. People aren't great at imagining how things can change.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#474

Post by gargron »

capableweb wrote: post #26
rglullis wrote: post #11

On the one hand, I am sad to hear about it and even more so due to the circumstances. On the other, I feel a bit validated in my belief that we need to have professionally managed instances on the fediverse. "Community Support" only goes so far. Thousands of people using a service, but how many of them actually help with its upkeep? I know that my instance has only a handful of paying users, and it is barely paying f…

Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something. Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth" and so on, looking at you AWS).

Saying it as the person in charge of developing Mastodon, probably the most likely reason more servers don't charge for access is that it's not built into the software, so it would require either customizing the code or manually sending out invites based on external payments (e.g. Patreon, some servers actually do that). I would imagine the other likely reason is that complexity of signing up as a business with your local tax office, charging the right taxes based on where the customers are located, and accounting. I do absolutely agree that paying for your account would make running the servers so much more sustainable.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#475

Post by xani_ »

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.

Uh, no, it was always usability.

Insert any modern chat app and random user can drop a screenshot there trivally, do some basic text formatting, and paste code in nicely colored blob of text, all from comfort of single login in a browser. And now even jump to voice chat or video conference directly from it.

They can also look at what they missed in channel by just scrolling up. Sending files just worked. You just got notifications without extra fuckery. Hell, you get digest with conversations you miss.

That's why modern closed down chat ecosystems won. Coz it's easy for "normies" to use.

Let's take other example, XMPP. It had all that but in network of XEPs that some clients/servers implemented, some not, some just not very well, and some being fucky to config. It wasn't just "login here and get every feature" like it is in modern chat clients.

It had it's one shining moment where both facebook and google offered XMPP way into their garden so you could have connectivity across federation and just have a single contact list but that didn't matter to non-nerds that just used facebook/google talk so once they decided to close their gardens any benefit of xmpp faded away.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#476

Post by xani_ »

SyndicWill wrote: post #448
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…

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.

Well, it was true decade, maybe two ago. Stuff got faster and therefore cheaper too.

Server written in reasonably fast software on $10 (well, probably some extra bux in storage if community is image-heavy) VPS can reasonably serve tens of thousands of users in typical forum/blog/hn-esque format. Mastodon isn't but I don't doubt someone would rewrite it in something faster if there was a need for it.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#477

Post by daxvena »

assetlabel wrote: post #451
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.

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,…

> 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.

Wow that's a grim perspective. Somehow I doubt that catering to the consumerism that got us to where we are with climate change is what's going to help us fix it.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#478

Post by xani_ »

0x457 wrote: post #457
KoftaBob wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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: a…

Yeah, and there will be people that will just throw their porn collection there, hogging space on other people's drives for no good reason.

There is an option of dividing it between "publisher" (source) and "cachers" (caching whatever is recent and popular) but that only helps a little bit.

> 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.

Over 2 decades of pirating that has only been a problem for obscure and old stuff.

I don't see it being a problem in social network sense; you publish your stuff, if there is nobody wanting to look at it, seeds 1, leeches 0. Moment there is interest it propagates. It is of course problem if you want to see something archival that author is no longer in the network tho.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#479

Post by thephyber »

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote: post #465
jefftk wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Let’s use Google+ as an example. Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and have been at or near the top of their categories for over a decade. Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.

But still plenty popular - at it's peak it had 200 million users. For comparison, that's nearly 2/3 the population of the USA

That metric is very misleading.

That is the number of Google accounts that didn’t go through the effort of disconnecting from / opting out of Google+. For a few years, all new accounts were automatically enrolled in Google+. It’s likely an extremely inflated number compared to the number of users that engaged with Google+ social features.

Citation: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/google-doubles-plus-...

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