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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

#121

Post by fragmede »

MBCook wrote: post #33
sdiacom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the suggestion is for Mastodon to replace internal communication, but to use it as a social media outlet for your organization.

Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim. But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not. Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake. It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the g…

Sound ripe for confusion and we see this today with domain names and phishing. Are they @john.smith@cnn.com or @john.smith@cnnn.news or @john.smith@cnn.newss.com or @john.smith@cnn.news.hackers.ru?

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#122

Post by jimbob45 »

afavour wrote: post #41
mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

> If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future. > Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad. I me…

Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring

It was none of those things and was widely regarded to be the worst-run company in tech not named Theranos or WeWork, including on this very website. It's fine to dislike Musk and it's fine to dislike the moves he's made but this revisionist history has to stop.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#123

Post by judge2020 »

mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

This is what happened with GitHub after the MS acquisition announcement as well. Right after the announcement there was a HN post about repo creation/imports being up 1000% or something, but now we can tell that not too much has changed (and GitLab was free hosted as well; you have to run your own mastodon instance). Until mastodon itself brings some killer feature that makes it de-facto better than Twitter, or Twitter actively starts promoting hate speech to people who otherwise are only interested in the art / 'art' parts of the platform, then it'll still be relevant even if it's bleeding a lot more money than it used to.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#124

Post by anderspitman »

alexb_ wrote: post #113
anderspitman wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Virality is a big part of social media. The fact that a lot of people wanting to see something I made punishes me with hundreds of dollars worth of overage fees means that it's just bad to use it. You are punished for "succeeding". It's not about the average user, but when said average user gets their 15 minutes.

As I said, if the protocol itself can't handle this scenario, it's doomed to have low adoption. Unless of course ISPs get pressured into lifting datacaps. Maybe a "viral" clause for exactly these sorts of situations? I think there are multiple potential solutions.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#127

Post by gpm »

unicornporn wrote: post #70
sneak wrote: post #12

No organization wants to do this, unfortunately. Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money, made more expensive by the choice in the Mastodon design to not support virtual hosting on a per-domain basis. You have to run (and admin) a complete new instance of Mastodon for each domain you wish to support.

> No organization wants to do this, unfortunately. Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money […] 2000 active users for $89 per month[1]. That's probably less than you would spend on toilet paper for 2000 employees. I don't think money would be the biggest reason why an organization or company wouldn't commit to the Fediverse. Mastodon is also a DigitalOcean 1-click app[2] if you're willing to spen…

If the version info on that DO link is correct, it's 2 and a bit years out of date. I'm sure it has support for updating everything internally, but I have to wonder if that's the best way to do this.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#128

Post by alexb_ »

dmonitor wrote: post #50
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…

Is Tailscale not good enough for a simple tunneling service?

What's a tunneling service? Do I need to use that before I can make a Mastodon account? What app is that on - wait, there are "instances", what the hell is that? Screw it, this is too complicated - I'm going back to twitter.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#129

Post by [deleted] »

illuminati1911 wrote: post #90
afavour wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? It involves work. Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. Now it is none of those things, for better or worse. I think people see federation as a means to avoid a similar outcome in the future. > Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad. I me…

Laying off staff of a company that has barely added any new features during the last 10 years and has always been operating at a loss is not necessarily a bad thing for the future of the platform. You are right about the chaotic way things are added/removed right now, but I personally prefer it to what Twitter was before Musk: Force login on the main page and unfair ideological censorship. We'll see what happens in t…

[deleted]

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#130

Post by snapetom »

anderspitman wrote: post #101
alexb_ wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, I'm sure someone like Selena Gomez is going to get her team to self hosting from her EC2 instance /s

The "famous people" care about getting their posts to fans. If you're able to convince and migrate hundreds of millions of teenagers to this self-hosted dream, sure. However, that's just not going to happen.

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