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Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

mastodon.social

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Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#61
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nice thought, but reality is always different. A really popular person might have many millions of followers on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes. That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image. You can say that a single user should not have that many followers, however the roo…

Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If anything, it can be treated as a technological problem, solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting their own instance as already suggested several times on the Fediverse. The Fedivers…

> a famous enough person hosting their own instance

So if the likes Obama or Stephen King want to move over to Mastodon their barrier of entry would be to complete this laundry list [1] or find a service that does this for them? Given that they own the instance, they would also need to provide moderation for it.

I don't disagree that there are solutions to the scale problem. What I have trouble seeing are solutions that are viable. That's the thing about a centralized service--you have a company that handles all of this so your users don't have to.

[1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/run-your-own/#so-you-want...

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also ignores the hilariously terrible time Twitter had scaling up in the first few years of it's life.

Is that relevant though? Twitter is stable (enough) now. It's competing against present day Twitter, not the Twitter of years past.

> It's competing against present day Twitter

Sure but that has the caveat that 75% of the staff were recently let go, the owner is an attention-deficit "BREAK THINGS AND BREAK FAST" lunatic whiplashing back and forth over policy changes and bans, and as such, people using the Fediverse have a certain tolerance for glitchiness because it's better than the alternative right now.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#63
My biggest gripe is that (afaik) there's no 'view other server's timeline' view-you need to actually go to that server, then back to yours when you want to follow someone. Instances are becoming sort of like meta-hashtags so I hope that gets added eventually.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If anything, it can be treated as a technological problem, solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting their own instance as already suggested several times on the Fediverse. The Fedivers…

> a famous enough person hosting their own instance So if the likes Obama or Stephen King want to move over to Mastodon their barrier of entry would be to complete this laundry list [1] or find a service that does this for them? Given that they own the instance, they would also need to provide moderation for it. I don't disagree that there are solutions to the scale problem. What I have trouble seeing are solutions t…

> or find a service that does this for them?

Assuming that Mastodon growth continues, such services will probably emerge (there are already a couple of Mastodon hosting services, but there's probably a market for a "so you're a celebrity who wants a single-user Mastodon instance" service which has yet to be filled).

> Given that they own the instance, they would also need to provide moderation for it.

If it was a single-user instance, that would be fairly trivial :)

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#65
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding c…

Twitter only works because it is centralized. The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. On the…

>The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties.

In some ways, and for some purposes, this is very likely a feature. A good amount of the fediverse wants small healthy communities, not Twitter but federated (i.e. everything going everywhere all the time).

I will absolutely agree that it's sub-par for almost anything happening now, which is a problem. But it's experiencing unprecedented growth - there will be growing pains, just like non-federated things do when they have unprecedented growth.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#66

My biggest gripe is that (afaik) there's no 'view other server's timeline' view-you need to actually go to that server, then back to yours when you want to follow someone. Instances are becoming sort of like meta-hashtags so I hope that gets added eventually.

why not look at actual hashtags (and if you’re on mastodon 4+, you can even follow them)?

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes the network congestion exponentially worse. It’s not scalable.

Email mailing groups figured out a way of scaling despite the same sort of exponential congestion. If anything, Fediverse traffic between larger clusters may eventually ossify around some larger pipes, not unlike the Internet traffic being handled by backbone operators.

No post body was provided.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#68
post #8

Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.

By this logic, there should've been no new social networks after Twitter. I point to Tiktok as a contradiction. There are many more factors that your simplification ignores.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#69
post #8

Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.

Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.

People have been putting check mark emojis in their Fedi display names forever, as a joke. While I could see an instance considering something like that to help pay for server costs I don't think it's likely to be very popular.

Re: Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

#70
Movetodon lists all my Twitter follows and their corresponding mastodon handles but the tool doesn’t let me follow them? Clicking the mastod name leads to a as 404 and that’s it? I was hoping to be able to just say ”follow all” or at least do it one by one. Am I not holding it right.
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