Mastodon.technology Shutdown • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#551

Post by Sargos » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 7:41 PM UTC

somat wrote: post #489

HellsMaddy wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? This has always confused me and is part of the reason I haven't started using it, I couldn't decide on which instance to use. Why can't an account be globally unique and not tied to a specific instance? Why, as a user, do I have to deal with the low-level concept of an instance? Is this all just a consequence of…

because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then becomes why can't you change your name? and it has mainly to do with avoiding name conflicts in administratively isolated systems. A major problem in distributed systems is names. one solution is to do what dns did, you can have nice names but you only get to pick…

>perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns.

ENS (https://ens.domains/) solves this problem rather elegantly. A single source of truth that is decentralized so any app can use it without trusting anyone. It wasn't around when Mastadon was being built unfortunately but is useful for developers of new apps and protocols.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#552

Post by mariusor » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

Xeoncross wrote: post #547

mariusor wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

First of all, I must clarify that I didn't truly address your initial statement, that "all" ActivityPub elements should be E2E encrypted, which is a notion that I find absurd, because it increases the complexity at least an order of magnitude and except "Create", no other activity in the specification has side effects that pass "content" between servers. In my opinion the only part of an ActivityPub request that can be sensitive and could require encryption are dereferenced objects inlined in a "Create" activity.

What I addressed with my (granted too terse answer) was that E2E communication is actually possible, but it would require one of the following options:

A "Create" Activity can wrap any type of object that has a JSON-LD document describing it (the ActivityStreams vocabulary is extensible[1]) so adding a new "E2EEncryptedMessage" object that contains all the properties required (and which are not already exposed in the existing vocabulary, eg, public keys which exist for the actors that participate in the exchange) in such a communication is possible. As long as all the information required for E2E can be encoded fully at each communication step (ie, nothing needs to be communicated off-band) everything will behave as expected for the clients that support this protocol extension.

Another option would be to piggy back on existing Object types like "Document" and encode a full E2E payload in it's "Content" to obtain a similar effect but with less expressiveness from a ActivityPub point of view. This probably needs a custom "MimeType" to accompany it so other clients can avoid processing these objects.

In conclusion, that's what I meant by having ActivityPub behave like "wire protocol", and apologies if I created confusion.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#extendedty...

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#553

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 7:56 PM UTC

remram wrote: post #549

dredmorbius wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having gone through this multiple times on both Mastodon and other social networks (Google+), not having a readily-accessible discussion record is a problem.

I'd created both a subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus) and wiki (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page) to memorialise at least some of that discussion, as well as the on-platform discussion.

That last is of course now unobtainable, though there were over 700 snapshots of the community homepage saved to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, see:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190401071102/https://plus.goog...>

Because of the mechanics of both G+ and IAWBM, actually navigating to articles from that archive ... mostly does not work.

The G+ community had over 4,000 members (pretty good for late-stage G+). The subreddit ... a hair over 300.

People. Will. Not. Go. Off. Platform. Even. If. That. Completely. Fucks. Them. Over.

It's a really perverse dynamic.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#554

Post by ufmace » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 8:25 PM UTC

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

I agree with the sibling that that isn't a representative number. I think we'd want to know something related to actual participation - what's the average daily or weekly number of posts or likes or whatever equivalent is in Plus versus Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#555

Post by CRConrad » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

yieldcrv wrote: post #381

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…

> Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the admin(s) and move on. I'm understanding that the data is gone and you're bragging about the observation that the protocol still functions? I'm not sure this is an aspect any of us care about? I think we can all observe that a co…

> in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone

Oh, is that what this thread is about? Who says it is?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#556

Post by CRConrad » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 9:31 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #233

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…

> f*c*book Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of using M$ Instead of Microsoft? Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling

No, it seems we're making a little joke: The asterisks don't necessarily have to mean 'a' and 'e', do they? They could be some other letters...

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#557

Post by rglullis » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

Kye wrote: post #550

rglullis wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I am not even talking about adding crypto into the network protocol - which I agree is not needed unless you are an ideologue. What I am saying is that smaller instances (from tens to low hundreds of users) could accept crypto for payments and use that to fund its maintenance.

Yeah, you could do it with regular payment processors as well, but with crypto you could not only avoid the fees from micropayments (layer-2 solutions already exist and allow fast and cheap transfers) but most importantly you could run these instances without dealing with bureaucracy. No taxman will come after you because you are getting a few hundred bucks per month.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#558

Post by jron » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 11:04 PM UTC

mariusor wrote: post #541

jron wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wasn't expecting permalink to be the comment section. Very cool project! I'm always on the lookout for an altruistic reddit contender.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#559

Post by yieldcrv » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 12:14 AM UTC

CRConrad wrote: post #555

yieldcrv wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the admin(s) and move on. I'm understanding that the data is gone and you're bragging about the observation that the protocol still functions? I'm not sure this is an aspect any of us care about? I think we can all observe that a co…

> in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone Oh, is that what this thread is about? Who says it is?

You answered a question with a question.

So is the answer that I'm misunderstanding, or is the answer that I'm understanding correctly. Are the ramifications that I highlighted true in either case, or false?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#560

Post by dvtkrlbs » Sun, Oct 09, 2022, 4:23 AM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #296

noirscape wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a technical decision he forced through after it was deemed to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch of alternate endpoints…

As a complete outsider who thrives on drama, everyone sucks here. Alex has shit opinions, 100%. But the back and forths in the Pleroma MRs linked are at the level of high school catty drama. And that applies to everyone in there, on both sides. I feel like every single MR listed would have gone completely differently if the people involved treated the others as humans and actually worked towards building better softw…

That is what I noticed as well. The behavior of most of the people involved in these MRs were really toxic and unwelcoming whatever the reason might be.