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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

#211

Post by 9wzYQbTYsAIc »

jeffbee wrote: post #32
phoe-krk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Didn't you just describe Twitter?

Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.

This is probably the right post to refer everyone to the Mastodon Server Covenant, which does bind the service provider to some level of consistency: https://joinmastodon.org/covenant

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

#213

Post by _-david-_ »

wheats wrote: post #176
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.

Gettr, Parler, Truth Social, Hive, Tribel, Post, Cohost, etc. etc. etc. Apparently the decentralized stuff does matter because Mastodon is by far the largest Twitter clone and that's its defining feature.

Isn't Gab the largest one? While it does use Mastadon, it doesn't peer with other servers so it is basically the same as the centralized servers.

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

#214

Post by maxsilver »

aranelsurion wrote: post #194
maxsilver wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. They did? Mastodon is basically a full-blown clone of Twitter by a competent team. Yes, it's also open-source and decentralized. But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks). > Make it easy to migra…

> But you can mostly ignore that most of the time, and 99% of users do so. (in much the same way that iPhones are decentralized across cell carriers, but that mostly doesn't matter to regular folks). That wasn't the case at least for me. I couldn't ignore the decentralized part of the deal, because I couldn't register at mastodon.social like how I could with twitter.com. Registrations were disabled (still the same as…

> It seems every Mastodon instance is its own kingdom managed by people I don't know running on arbitrary rules they've set.

Yep! This is also exactly how e-mail works, and yet everyone manages to get an e-mail account (or ten) with no problems.

> I still gave their server browser a try, and couldn't find anything that looks remotely official on the first page.

"Hello, helpdesk? I can't find the official email server. No, not Hotmail, not Yahoo, not G-mail, not Apple Me. I only want the official email server. Hello?"

> tl;dr for now mastodon doesn't offer an easy path to just use the service w/o thinking about its details.

Sure it does? Pick a free+open provider to register yourself (or ask any of your friends for an invite to their server).

It's no more effort than say, signing up for a cellphone telephone number, and everyone figured out how to do that. Children manage to handle "you have to pick a server first" when they load up Minecraft (each of which has it's own moderators and their own unique rules! -- some are even invite-only!), and the kids seem to get along just fine.

---

I get your point. Being a free, open, decentralized network means there's one extra step to registration -- I agree with your complaint.

But it's literally just one extra step, and it's not even a difficult one. The idea that this makes Mastodon difficult to use because of that, seems completely farfetched -- every other popular network has had a similar step and managed to overcome it with zero issues.

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

#215

Post by lapcat »

crazygringo wrote: post #203
pwinnski wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world, it turns out, contains more than just hammers. The fediverse, it turns out, isn't primarily a messaging service. So yes, if you define X as "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world," then X must support as many people as possible. But if you don't define X that way, then not supporting 100 million people isn't such a big deal. Millions of people are already happily on fediverse…

I'm sorry, but just a million times no. If Mastodon isn't "a messaging service that intends to connect people across the world", then I can't even imagine what it's supposed to be. Because that is exactly what it is. And if it somehow hit a limit at 10 million total users, then it would be a complete failure. And to say that "it wouldn't really detract from the Fediverse" if you couldn't follow popular people because…

I think you're missing the point of a social network.

Barack Obama is not social on Twitter. You can't talk to him. You can't have a conversation. Look at his Twitter feed: when's the last time he's replied to anyone? He issues mini press releases, that's all.

You can't email Barack Obama either, by the way. I mean, you can try, but good luck with that.

You talk about a messaging service, but it's entirely one-way messaging between famous people and non-famous people.

Mastodon users aren't looking to follow famous people and be passive recipients of press releases from famous people. They're looking to have conversations with each other. In this respect, Obama is irrelevant.

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

#216

Post by vorpalhex »

BoorishBears wrote: post #114
vorpalhex wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Then it's not really a good faith reply to their point is it? The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation. Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics. A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive sounds like a pretty awf…

All things require funding. There are no exceptions. My discord guild also requires time and money.

So it goes.

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

#217

Post by tommica »

snvzz wrote: post #188

If I was in charge of Twitter, I'd remake it so that it's just a Mastodon server. Suddenly, no reason to migrate to another server, as you can just stay in the biggest one and keep your clout. Google pulled off something similar with gtalk and XMPP. Remember Jabber?

But what about tracking and ads? Would be difficult to track users that are in a different instance, with no way of showing ads to them - not sure twitter could survive without that.

Idea itself is a neat one though.

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

#218

Post by ls15 »

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?

They don't have to federate to everyone.

If the government does not want to put public communication into the hands of tech billionaires again, their second best option after using available software is to build a platform from scratch.

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

#219

Post by elsjaako »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #190
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…

> maybe it doesn't need to scale for people to ultimately have a much better experience It certainly needs less features. I'm sure quite a bit of Twitter's infrastructure is dedicated to ads and analytics.

There's also no full text search on Mastodon, and no single server has access to all the posts on the federated system.

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

#220

Post by TheHappyOddish »

EarlKing wrote: post #12
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?

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…

> If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time.

Agree. I've been using Kagi for a few months now and have been pleasantly surprised I haven't had to revert back to Google once. I resisted for a long time, but Googles results have been going downhill for a whle, and I realised that if I want to use something, somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody should probably be me, the user.

"Unicorn" companies like social media live off investment dollars then usually ads. The former has dried up, only leaving the latter. I'd never pay $8 a month for Twitter, but I also don't care about it. I'd imagine many daily users would.

I've been a part of many communities where the owners have to beg for money for running costs monthly. It's always a struggle, and I don't see Mastodon being any different without compromising their principles.

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