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

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

#81

Post by guerrilla »

shagie wrote: post #54
cbozeman wrote: 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.

The entirety of twitter is too large to just lift and shift to mastodon - absolutely correct. There are also slightly different social norms and styles of discovery. However , communities and professions have already moved and will continue to move. Things like Black Twitter ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Twitter and https://blacktwitter.io/about ) or Energy Twitter ( https://twitter.com/hashtag/energytwitter…

Not to mention large parts of academia.

https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon

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

#82

Post by adamrezich »

mempko wrote: post #56

The discussions how a decentralized system like Mastodon won't work reminds me of the early days of networks. People were saying the same thing about the web and the internet and claiming CompuServe and AOL would dominate. Twitter is like CompuServe and AOL, Mastodon is like the internet. One based on proprietary systems, the other based on open standards like ActivityPub. History showed that centralization is ultima…

> History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile.

but how many people today use Discord et al. compared to IRC? I think the centralized-decentralized thing is a cycle, not a one-way logical progression.

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

#83

Post by vorpalhex »

BoorishBears wrote: post #46
vorpalhex wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who says unpaid? Make your friends buy you dinner or throw some cash your way. One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can experiment with new payment models.

I can't tell if this is satire in response to sarcasm, could you clarify?

Not satire!

You're providing a real service to your friends - a mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them to do so.

How you do this is up to you.

I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8 folks who play on it with regularity.

For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food, either cooking for each other or catching dinner out. That works well for my friend group and I perceive this as fair.

Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion, whatever).

There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can be run.

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

#84

Post by rcarr »

enumjorge wrote: post #61
phoe-krk wrote: post #39

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…

I do wonder if the next phase of social media is to encourage people to use a single user instance similar to mastodon.host. It would probably have to offer more than just twitter though e.g peertube, pixelfed etc. Start with a free tier, have it all running on auto scale and then notify people when they start getting popular that they need to scale up and start paying for their instance if they want to grow their audience. Don’t know if it would work or not but it’s an idea.

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

#85

Post by Zak »

jacquesm wrote: post #44
EarlKing wrote: post #12

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…

Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2) bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements, bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible today. Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average…

Being based around a protocol rather than a single piece of software, it will likely end up that servers intended to grow large will run different software than servers intended to stay small.

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

#86

Post by georgyo »

zimpenfish wrote: post #58
georgyo wrote: 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…

> 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. But that's fixable in several ways - local media cache for an instance, the boost including the preview rather than each client fetching it for themselves, etc. The problem* with ActivityPub is that it's been designed and developed in a bit of…

There is already a local media cache. My comment doesn't suggest that each follower requests stuff from the home server, but each instance.

The instances cache pretty aggressively, but you still have a thundering herd when a popular person boosts a message.

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

#87

Post by guerrilla »

alkonaut wrote: post #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.

It did for me. I just did "follow all" again. You sure some extension isn't interfering?

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

#88

Post by jacquesm »

Zak wrote: post #85
jacquesm wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two observations: (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience and (2) bottlenecks tend to be identified and resolved up to the limit of the scaling laws and hardware improvements, bandwidth cost reduction and storage cost reduction tend to over time make the impossible thing from yesterday feasible today. Keep in mind that Torrents tend to be much larger than your average…

Being based around a protocol rather than a single piece of software, it will likely end up that servers intended to grow large will run different software than servers intended to stay small.

That could well happen, a bit like the difference between say 'gmail' and your own private mail server. The big trick will then be to stop it from becoming siloed again.

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

#89

Post by guerrilla »

323 wrote: post #5

It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?

New instances will be (are being) created. Supply will fill demand.

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

#90

Post by guerrilla »

drewzero1 wrote: post #80
thejohnconway wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I run a Mastodon server, registrations are open, and it's never gone down. What I see mostly are people coming over from Twitter and making a go of it. Some bounce, most stay, and some vastly prefer it. Part of the trick is moving over communities. You don't need the world and its dog. It's working already. It's replaced Twitter for me, and then some. The pessimism here on HN is bizarre! Isn't this what so many…

> The pessimism here on HN is bizarre! This has been my experience on HN in general, though I recognize I've been part of the problem. It's really easy to dump on things and feel smart.

Remember how pessimistic they were about Reddit? And some other successful startups? Someone made a full list of the predictions that were completely off once... No idea how to find that but it's out there.
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