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Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

martinfowler.com

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Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#101

Post by anderspitman »

alexb_ wrote: post #86
anderspitman wrote: post #34

Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone. In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new se…

My hardline 1TB per month up/down data cap says no to that entire idea. Can't selfhost when 1 person requesting a lot means you are out hundreds of dollars. But I do wish selfhosting was just easy. It shouldn't be this hard.

If a federated protocol causes the average user to use more than 1TB of traffic in a month, then it's a bad protocol.

There very well may be exceptional cases (famous people regularly going viral), but they wouldn't want to be hosting from a home location anyway.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#102

Post by yamtaddle »

mberning wrote: post #61
CJefferson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.

You weren't worried about it going bankrupt when it was losing millions of dollars a day and running in the red for years on end?

It was so poorly run that there's a chance Musk could have come in, fucked up pretty badly, and still maybe improved the books.

However, given the debt he's saddled it with as part of the buy-out, their situation is a lot worse than it was before. I don't see how it's salvageable.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#103

Post by dtparr »

phailhaus wrote: post #65
CJefferson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I am imagine their email server is also just for their employees. What's your point?

They literally link it at the end of the article with "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com " On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?

Mastodon is federated, so users of their instance are able to interact with the wider set of Mastodon instances, much like people with @google.com emails can interact with people with @microsoft.com emails, despite both instances being separately controlled and not open to people outside their respective companies. Not having an account on an instance, in other words, is not the same as it not being accessible.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#104

Post by Analemma_ »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #80
CJefferson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.

> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrat…

> Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months.

Twitter now has a burden of $1 billion in interest payments per year, which it did not several months ago. That's pretty meaningful. Completely apart from anything about Elon, it would be entirely reasonable to expect this additional burden to make the product worse, as debt obligations often do.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#105

Post by phailhaus »

robotresearcher wrote: post #95
phailhaus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They literally link it at the end of the article with "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com " On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?

Here's their public feed, linked from that page. https://toot.thoughtworks.com/public

Oh man, it took me so long to figure out how you got there. This is dead-on-arrival for nontechnical users.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#106

Post by roywashere »

jefftk wrote: post #45
KindAndFriendly wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Same way how people can subscribe to a company's Twitter account. Except that the company owns the content, server, and can define their own rules.

I think your parent was trying to point out how "toots" and "masto" are at odds with the professional image many companies try to present.

I also hate ‘toot’ and find it very awkward and much prefer if people just would refer to it as a ‘message’

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#107

Post by rcfox »

incomingpain wrote: post #62

Mastodon back in 2019 had a grand opportunity to set themselves up for success; they made the wrong decision. If they had made the correct decision in 2019; they could have in 2020 doubled down on the correct decision during the hunter biden laptop conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Mastodon will forever remain nothing because of this decision. Mastodon has no nazis, it does have that going for them. https://www.vice.…

You refer to some mysterious "decision" they made, but what was it?

(I know you've included a link, but it's such a long op-ed with no summary and it doesn't immediately mention decision making, so I don't feel like there's a guarantee of a pay off from reading it.)

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#109

Post by snapetom »

anderspitman wrote: post #34

Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone. In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new se…

The self-hosting argument shows how out of touch fediverse developers are.

Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#110

Post by parentheses »

“open source communities” are mostly good for topic oriented communities. otherwise, i believe commercial motivations are great for maximizing participation.

in the end communities with maximum participation will always be where creators are incentivized to be.

until the average user becomes willing to pay for X, ad based revenue models will always win. relatedly, paying for X is easier than setting up your own mastodon server.

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