Mastodon.technology Shutdown

On the other, I feel a bit validated in my belief that we need to have professionally managed instances on the fediverse. "Community Support" only goes so far. Thousands of people using a service, but how many of them actually help with its upkeep?

I know that my instance has only a handful of paying users, and it is barely paying for itself, and far from paying all the work that I've put into it. But charging for access brings a lot of benefits: it keeps spammers and bots away, it is a good filter against trolls and best of all makes it explicit what is expected of all parties.

Rest: As someone who does not (yet) use Mastodon, I'm curious about the impact of a single node shutting down. At least in this case this is happening in an orderly manner and with warning.

I'm also curious if this is a problem with Mastodon in general or did this particular node just become too popular for its own good. I seem to recall that some instances (Adam Curry's No Agenda related instance) limiting membership. Or perhaps I'm thinking of something else. But that may not help if the problem is traffic generated by the entire network as seems to be hinted at in the post.

Please excuse my ignorance of how Mastodon operates that may be implicit in my questions.

It's a "typical" Rails application: large, convoluted, lot's of moving parts, and services, and generally slow as molasses (solved by throwing more hardware at it). As experienced Rails dev(ops), I managed to run and help run an instance, but it's not something done on a friday afternoon, let alone scale up.

What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services. I'm thinking about the difference between setting up a gitlab or a gitea. The first is Rails, needs ruby, gems, bundler, workers, database server, redis, mailserver and whatnot. And thats for manually installing on a server - no pipeline or anything to manage future changes. The second a single binary (pre compiled from a go codebase) everything statically linked (even sqlite is built in, with option to upgrade to postgres). Plop it on a server start it and go. For an intranet you might even skip putting a server/https in front, just run on exposed ports.

We can dockerize all the ruby-stuff, but that might make it easier, it doesn't make it simpler, it really makes it more complex. And the performance-issues aren't solved.

The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on your VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and simple servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a huge, slow and hairy beast.

2. you can just sign up for twitter, you don't need to pick an open instance run by some stranger.

3. deploying a rails app isn't trivial, mastodon being written in rails and dependent on multiple DBs makes it harder to install and thus harder for people to run their own server.

As we continue to improve computing power and efficiency, I think the idea of using a federated social network so you can "own your data" is going to become less and less attractive. If you take this concept to its logical extreme, eventually everyone will run their own social networking server, and we'll be interconnected with each other through some kind of DHT magic. After all, the fediverse is still "someone else's computer", it's just that "someone else" in this case is some guy and not a for-profit company. It doesn't really solve the problem.