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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#571

Post by fl0id »

Sargos wrote: post #551
somat wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dev…

no it doesn't. and you'd have to pay for names, which disqualifies it for mastodon like usage from the start.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#572

Post by wizzwizz4 »

P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #548
xani_ wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it's not about that. This developer created a fake website claiming to represent the whole Fediverse, à la https://joinmastodon.org/. His version recommends the following instances, in order, with the message "Browse a small sample of Fediverse servers that are welcoming to newcomers below.":

• Literal Neo-Nazi site. Defederated by nearly all of Fedi because they are literal, card-carrying Nazis.

• Transphobia-even-if-it-means-misogyny site run by his wife. Defederated by most of fedi, for harassment campaigns. Defederated from my instance for harassing a cis woman who worked at a feminist charity for, as I recall, having pronouns in her bio, which is apparently too much like solidarity for them. (There were a couple of good people on that instance, last time I checked. Well, one good person. I think she messaged me later, saying she left.)

• His personal instance that basically nobody uses. (It's too obscure to be blocked by most of Fedi, but it's blocked by most of the instances he tries to interact with; he inevitably breaks their rules.)

• shitposter.club: A kinda-okay, but not moderated to my taste, instance. Blocked by some of fedi; probably on the list because they still federate with his personal instance.

• freespeechextremist.com: A barely moderated instance that… well, I trust its sysadmin – sorry, its BOFH. And it is friendly. But it's a "free speech zone", with all that entails; there are some total arseholes there, and the only thing keeping them from causing major damage is the relentless bullying they get from the other users until they leave.

The bottom two are legitimately part of the Fediverse – albeit the shady alleyways of the Fediverse – but we've almost universally shunned the top three. This developer used SEO hacks to get his fake near the top of the search results. (Please don't link it here; we don't need to give it more SEO juice.)

He does not represent the people who make the protocols; he does not represent the people who curate the communities; he does not represent the communities; and yet he claims to, all the while decrying how mean the community is being to him.

We just want to live our lives, and use the 'net to talk to each other. If anyone's making this political, it's him.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#573

Post by wizzwizz4 »

dvtkrlbs wrote: post #560
mynameisvlad wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the latest "cool" software is Misskey. https://misskey-hub.net/ Mastodon's still the most popular, though.

(English version of that website available; just add /en/ to the end of the URL.)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#574

Post by gargron »

preseinger wrote: post #566
gargron wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PostgreSQL and Redis are a constellation of half-dozen databases?

Sorry, I wasn't precise: it's two databases (Postgres, Redis), an HTTP frontend (nginx) and specific versions of two interpreted language runtimes (Ruby, Node). The point stands.

While Mastodon can be used for small server purposes (e.g. server-of-one) it is really geared towards professional use - providing a service to thousands of users and scaling up horizontally. Looking beyond technical requirements, so many of Mastodon's features echo this -- account management, reporting, moderation. In that context, I really do not think that "uses a reverse proxy in the front" and "has a database and a cache store" is a factor.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#575

Post by Doxin »

lapcat wrote: post #101
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…

> Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were run? I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.

Except that the freenode takeover didn't really have much to do with IRC as such. It had to do with a domain name theft.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#576

Post by fennecfoxy »

Federation seems to be the way to go but current implementations seem a bit lacking from what I've seen.

If you have an account with a Mastodon server, what if the owner takes a disliking to you? What if their server shuts down and you can't migrate your account/identity?

Realistically every person should be hosting their own personal Mastodon node to at least base their account/identity around it, then consume/interact with content via federation but self-hosting isn't a system that works for "normal" people.

Maybe it already works like this (I haven't looked into their code/Mastodon at all recently) but a system where your identity is federated/shared across nodes in the same way torrents are mean that the more communities that you participate in the more "backed up" your identity is; if one node shuts down, your identity is still stored across many other nodes. Hell, it would be possible for people to run identity nodes that deal with nothing other than acting as an identity host/backup for users.

I think the PR advantage for things like Twitter is that people can go to one place: "Twitter", it's easy and you can locate all content from there. Mastodon still seems a little fragmented by comparison. We all might be tech people but I think for regular people to adopt there could be a few improvements.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#577

Post by account42 »

jefftk wrote: post #179
KvanteKat wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't involve cryptography, but mastodon has for at least a couple of years supported link-verification in profiles (it basically checks if a link back to your mastodon profile exists on a page linked on your profile), so a linking to a page that only you credibly control (say, a personal website) is the de-facto system of decentralized user-verification on mastodon. Edit: supported since 2018 https://github.com…

It does sort of involve crypto: if the page you control weren't served over HTTPS it wouldn't be too hard (DNS poisoning) for someone else to trick a server into verifying the wrong user.

If DNS poisoning is so easy why don't you perform the same attach on Let's Encrypt since that also uses plain HTTP.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#578

Post by account42 »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #572
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I'm getting from this is the vilifying is really about identity politics. Which makes sense and means I pegged it correctly.

No, it's not about that. This developer created a fake website claiming to represent the whole Fediverse, à la https://joinmastodon.org/ . His version recommends the following instances, in order, with the message "Browse a small sample of Fediverse servers that are welcoming to newcomers below.": • Literal Neo-Nazi site. Defederated by nearly all of Fedi because they are literal, card-carrying Nazis . • Transphobia-…

https://jointhefedi.com/

Why is it fake just because you don't like the choice of recommended instances. Does it not make sense to recommend instances that are more open to federating with others?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#579

Post by jefftk »

account42 wrote: post #577
jefftk wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does sort of involve crypto: if the page you control weren't served over HTTPS it wouldn't be too hard (DNS poisoning) for someone else to trick a server into verifying the wrong user.

If DNS poisoning is so easy why don't you perform the same attach on Let's Encrypt since that also uses plain HTTP.

Certificate Authorities are extremely careful about DNS (and BGP hijacking), more so than basically everyone else.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#580

Post by Sargos »

fl0id wrote: post #571
Sargos wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 dev…

no it doesn't. and you'd have to pay for names, which disqualifies it for mastodon like usage from the start.

Can you elaborate on how it doesn't? It ticks all of the boxes from your message.

Only the top level namespaces require a purchase. Names for services (e.g. james.mastadon.eth) are free. A live example of this is Coinbase which gives users (name).cb.id for free. Once your service claims a namespace you have full control over it.

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