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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

#151

Post by shapefrog »

fleddr wrote: post #147
ls15 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What if 100 mil users want to move? Some of the new users will have to run new servers. For example if public officials are moving to Mastodon, I expect the state to run their own servers. It was never a good idea to allow Twitter to be a platform for (semi-)official communication.

Which will then need to federate to most other instances, causing an unmanagable load?

Is the problem of scale a) broadcasting the one person that millions of people want to see the tweets of or b) millions of people recieving the tweets of one person?

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

#152

Post by OkayPhysicist »

dchuk wrote: post #93

I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.

The 80% twitter clone that's "not an advanced concept" is fully eclipsed by Mastodon. You're free to host a Mastodon server that federates with no one, and there's your clone. The problem is the remaining 20%, which Mastodon has covered some of, but certainly wouldn't be done "quickly".

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

#153

Post by rsynnott »

boredhedgehog wrote: post #133
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…

> Mastodon is like the internet Which is why I believe that once the fediverse has fractured along ideological lines, as it inevitably must, the end result won't look much different from the old internet: big influencers running their own site/blog, with loose connections to ideological allies and a bunch of commenters in orbit.

I mean, arguably that has _already happened_; it's just that the Big Two far-right mastodon instances (Gab and Truth Social) do not federate. Note that Gab actually used to.

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

#155

Post by progval »

Ciantic wrote: post #130
jarbus wrote: post #125

How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of email? Hadn’t the success of email already shown that it’s possible to scale decentralized protocols?

It's possible, but there is no advertisements, and most servers are run by volunteers. Right now, with current tech stack, which isn't most efficient I heard Leo Laporte who runs TWiT Podcast network and ~5000 user https://twit.social server it costs him 380 dollars / month for fully hosted using https://masto.host server. Sure it can scale, it's not harder than newsletters, but it needs money, I have serious doubts…

It doesn't cost that much when properly configured and on dedicated hardware. My own instance, oc.todon.fr (running since 2017 and with currently ~2500 users), runs on a 5€/month server (HTTP front-end) and less than a quarter of the resources of a 800€ server at home.

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

#156

Post by [deleted] »

pwinnski wrote: post #149
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…

I think there are some differences that are key. 1. The fediverse doesn't necessarily need to scale to 100 million or more people, and if it were to hypothetically hit a hard limit at 10 million, that would still be fine. Anecdotally, many people are reporting similar levels of engagement--and more positive engagement--with even a small percentage of their twitter audience. 2. Usenet failed largely because it was ove…

[deleted]

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

#157

Post by Karrot_Kream »

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…

> (1) maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience

Big, heavy doubt. This Twitter debacle has generated ridiculous, crazy amounts of drama and emoting, the likes I haven't seen on the net in ... a while. This kind of emoting and drama stirring only works when the pot is large. A storm in a small teapot really isn't much. It reminds me of the high drama that used to happen on large IRC channels run by teens in the early '00s, where you'd wake up and some portion of the server got muted or banned for some completely opaque but intensely personal reason. (I was one of the teens so I'm not implying like I was much better than the rest of them lol.)

I'm in 20-something small Matrix rooms/spaces and Discord guilds and none of them are nearly this dramatic. The kind of folks that seek engagement on Twitter IMO are in it for the high drama that you can only get on a large social platform. The folks that stay on the Fediverse are looking for something entirely different. I'm hopeful that some folks try the Fediverse and realize they didn't need Twitter at all (not in some sense of Twitter anger, but more that it's good for folks who want to socialize in smaller spaces be aware that it's very possible to do that on the net right now.)

FWIW If you're trying to build a small community and afraid of scaling issues, I still think hopping onto Matrix or Discord (preferably in that order) is a better idea. Synapse might be heavyweight but it's still lighter than running Mastodon, and if your community doesn't want to federate, you can run the much lighter Dendrite (or even lighter Conduit which is a bit more raw.) There's a large ecosystem of clients on all the big platforms for Matrix. Discord being a centralized, closed system has all of these problems solved as well.

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

#158

Post by OkayPhysicist »

fleddr wrote: post #141
spaceribs wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I could pose this question another way, what does Twitter do that Mastodon can't?

A lot of things. Whether they are good or bad things is another question. For now, Twitter scales better. There's no such thing as an instance, a slow instance, or registration simply being closed. Twitter preserves content. Yes, I know it's currently debatable, but in general it does. On Mastodon, any instance can go the way of the dodo, and this regularly happens. Further, it's standard policy to wipe out all media…

I feel like you give too little credit to the "normies". My 92 year-old grandmother figured out how to join plenty of forums for her birdwatching and knitting and whatnot hobbies (classic phpBB style things). Choosing an instance is no more complicated than that, but you get the added bonus of being able to interact with the other forums, too.

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

#159

Post by ISL »

dchuk wrote: post #93

I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.

I don't think anyone has launched it because they can see how much difficulty Twitter had turning a profit. There are a number of companies that could launch such a thing (especially now that hiring former-Twitter employees should be as easy as it will ever be), but they also have financial teams capable of modeling whether or not it would be profitable.

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

#160

Post by rvz »

mempko wrote: post #55
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?

Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable. Why doesn't anyone remember how shitty Twitter was when it was growing. Slow and constantly breaking. Mastodon is working fine even after millions moved to it. Yes, Admins had to scale up, but they did it. I like that I pay my admin. No ads. No bullshit.

> Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable.

I don’t see any normal person self-hosting their own email service. Even if they did, good luck with handling spam. It can only viably scale to hundreds of millions with centralization; hence Gmail, Outlook, etc to reduce / limit the spam issue.

Mastodon has the same mistakes as the other federated alternatives and has already proven to be unable to scale more efficiently than Twitter, let alone the ridiculous hurdles to begin using it.

We are talking about scaling to hundreds of millions, not ten thousand or a shy hundred thousand and it falls over on a single moderator’s instance.

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