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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#541

Post by mariusor »

jron wrote: post #450
mariusor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I don't understand the question, it already supports comments. littr.me is basically a link aggregator and discussion platform that's very similar in UX to (old) reddit, hacker news and lobste.rs.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#542

Post by Kamq »

HellsMaddy wrote: post #494
Kamq wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? There's no central server, and not all of the instances talk to each other. Where... where would you put the account data?

I imagine it working similarly to IPFS, where the data is distributed across the network.

There's not one network with mastodon. Depending on which node you start in, you can get different graphs (from what I remember, mostly due to differences in value between valuing free speech vs preventing hate speech).

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#543

Post by seydor »

berkes wrote: post #525
seydor wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sorry, but this simply isn't true. Hasn't been ever, really. I say this as someone who set up and scaled one of Europe's large dedicated WordPress hosting platforms. Everything, from nginx-phpfpm to varnish to scaling that horrible mess of plugins and themes your Fiverr dev delivered beyond just five req/min. It really isn't very easy. And certainly not simple.

maybe it s not highly scalable, but WP is easy, millions of people do it. IRC is also easy to setup. Any of the mastodon/Matrix servers are not, and they dont really scale well (which is weird to me, why is it challenging to support a 100 users chat). Decentralized services should be designed to be lightweight ab inition because they are not going to run on supercomputers.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#544

Post by [deleted] »

KoftaBob wrote: post #530
xani_ wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All fair/valid points to consider. The closest example so far that I've found of a truly P2P online community is Aether: https://getaether.net

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#545

Post by KoftaBob »

xani_ wrote: post #478
0x457 wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

edit: Scratch that, a more fleshed out and popular protocol that implements this P2P concept is Scuttlebutt: www.http://scuttlebutt.nz/ The most user friendly and refined client I’ve found that implements this protocol is Planetary: https://www.planetary.social/

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#546

Post by Kye »

rtpg wrote: post #428
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…

I think part of it is there are instances that are just sooooo broad. Mastodon.social … shouldn’t exist? I think. It’s too broad and kinda duplicates the general social network issues of everyone using the thing. Meanwhile there are loads of three-digit-user instances that are more focused (and have less problems on a tech level, and on a social level)

I think the project instances exist so people will at least get on board, try it, figure it out, and move on to a more suitable instance rather than abandon the whole thing entirely. The alternative is losing lots of potential users at the front door.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#547

Post by Xeoncross »

mariusor wrote: post #375
Xeoncross wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I disagree, ActivityPub is closely intertwined[1] with ActivityStreams[2] and expose all the actions and intents of the sender as part of the protocol.

1: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#like-activity-outbox 2: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#548

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

xani_ wrote: post #483
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can we stop villifying people we disagree with? I've seen it so much, I'm more inclined to believe it absolutely didn't happen that way.

Well, you can probably easily see how this: https://blog.alexgleason.me/trans/ would trigger some people

What I'm getting from this is the vilifying is really about identity politics.

Which makes sense and means I pegged it correctly.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#549

Post by remram »

dredmorbius wrote: post #441
remram wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As I said, mastodon.technology announced shutdown in advance, they haven't yet shut down. So people can discuss future plans there, they don't have to move to do it.

I agree it is difficult in the situation you describe, which is not mastodon.technology's situation.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#550

Post by Kye »

rglullis wrote: post #484
gargron wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I doubt that any SaaS pays taxes based on where the users are located, so the only burden is in setting up the business in the first place. In any case, projects like open collective could help to manage fiscal issues. For smaller instances, I really have a hard time seeing tax authorities going after people because they decided to host a server and ask a total of $100-$1000 per year from a few dozen people. Lastly,…

The US has complicated state-by-state rules for who has to pay sales taxes and when. Other places seem to mostly have something like VAT with varying rules. One benefit of Patreon is they handle all this for you.

One of McAfee's last scams before he died was pushing a "crypto-based social network" that was just a poorly reskinned Mastodon called Hiveway.[0] It was 100% BS and didn't even bother to turn off federation. Hilarity ensued. There's nothing stopping someone from legitimately adding crypto support to it.

[0] https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/970280557887270912

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