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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#131

Post by mariusor »

berkes wrote: post #15
spiderfarmer wrote: post #3

> The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I always suspected this would be a massive problem with Mastodon. I contemplated running a server, but there's no way to know beforehand when you'll be running into a limit, like cost or time. Can you really build a social network on volunteers that invest their own money and time, with little reward?

The tech also doesn't help. 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…

> What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services.

I'm working on exactly that: a service that acts as an ActivityPub server (code[1], example[2], example application running on top of it[3]) for users in the form of a static binary. It supports multiple storage backends that can be selected individually or all together at build time and it can be extended to many more.

[1] https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox

[2] https://federated.id

[3] https://littr.me

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#132

Post by imhoguy »

monkin wrote: post #67
proactivesvcs wrote: post #28

This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move. Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved insta…

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project ado…

I am not participant but I have seen some invite only fediverse instances. Can't there be paid instances too, even pay by (please don't hate me here) watching ads ? Does actually anyone need to cater to millions of users?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#133

Post by Kye »

rvz wrote: post #87
monkin wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project ado…

Yes, hosting is a cost and it is not 'free', hence the frequent downtime with Mastodon instances, even when they had traffic during Elon's takeover of Twitter many of then could not even handle the new users. Also, these users don't even know which instance to go to, since there is little to no-one to talk on there. If there are 'hundreds of thousands' of users then that means they have just recentralized on Mastodon…

Six years of steady growth is a Silicon Valley failure. It is not a failure by any reasonable measure. I predicted back in the early days that Mastodon would grow slowly and organically as more people figured it out and helped people in their circles come over. It's slow and steady, but I was right. This is how things grew before anything less than a double-digit billion sale to one of the big tech companies was seen as a failure.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#134

Post by EarlKing »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #89
EarlKing wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to look very hard to find screaming racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular biases and kinks. I note for the record that this is precisely the sort of thing that doomed Voat. They got invaded by racists who decamped there after being given the boot from Reddit and promptly beg…

> You don't have to look very hard to find screaming racists, furries, and lolicons. They make no effort to hide themselves since operators apparently endorse that sort of behavior as long as it fits their own particular biases and kinks. Of course not. It's on the Internet. I don't have a problem with furries, people with bias or kinks. What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?…

> What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?

If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're using gains a reputation accordingly.

> And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on.

Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a federation. You have, at best, a gathering of barely-interoperable fiefdoms. You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#135

Post by derekzhouzhen »

monkin wrote: post #67
proactivesvcs wrote: post #28

This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move. Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved insta…

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project ado…

As a counter example, email is a federated system too. I don't think a federated network should, or can for that matter, mimic the user friendliness of a closed system; so there won't be massive exodus of users from Twitter to the federverse, no matter how screwed Twitter became.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#137

Post by samatman »

asim wrote: post #43
samatman wrote: post #42

My condolences to the admin, this is sad news. This strengthens my conviction that federation is a bad architecture for something like Mastodon. A fully distributed system, urbit being the easiest to try right now, can't stick someone with the responsibility to keep a bunch of other people online. It can't stick those people with the responsibility to move off the server. Each user runs a server process, locally or o…

Doing full P2P just isn't there yet. It makes total sense but without talking about some web3 Blockchain, it's hard to get everyone to run a distributed database, identity server, etc without it being some single binary.

Urbit exists right now, anyone with a command line can download it, create a comet, and see what they think.

It can't be denied that it's a practical option, given that there are thousands (maybe in the tens?) of users who are doing stuff on the network.

There's a lot of work which needs to be done, to make the core event loop faster, and enable scaling to the kind of social graph celebrities have. I'm confident in the technical leadership of the project at this point in time.

Full disclosure: I've been a user of urbit for many years, and stand to benefit materially if it becomes popular. I neither work on urbit nor on urbit things, never have, and have invested no money in either urbit or its address space.

I still think it's a good idea, just like I did when it was barely usable and much weirder.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#138

Post by mariusor »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #14

This is why I haven't gotten into mastodon. What server do I choose? At best they're internet forums from the 90s where the admin eventually has to move on (for often valid reasons, like in this case.) Also why does this random guy have MY data? Why does he need to trust a new admin with my data for a succession plan to be possible? I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed. Mastodon federated at the wrong gra…

> I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed.

With all due respect an RSS feed is not "your" data, it's just data that you aggregated. You're not comparing it to the fediverse in good faith. If you must make a comparison you can do it with email: do you have an email address? Do you trust your email provider with your data? It's the same with ActivityPub based servers.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#139

Post by davexunit »

noirscape wrote: post #25
berkes wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech also doesn't help. 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…

There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in ter…

Having used Mastodon for years now, my experience has been that when I receive an abusive/spam/troll message it's a safe bet that it was from a Pleroma instance. I know I'm lot alone in defaulting to distrusting users on Pleroma instances. Just something for new fediverse users to keep in mind.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#140

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th »

afavour wrote: post #129
P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About a month ago I had a mechanic call me pissed and tell me they didn't want to work with me anymore if I didn't trust them. I had been asking questions over text. That this happened is a statement of fact. I'm taking my old ford explorer over to him this weekend. Do you know why? Because I asked him what was wrong and explained the intent of the questions. We've had a working relationship for over 2 years, he was…

I feel like this is personal for you somehow and I don't know why. I'm not "campaigning" against anything, I posted one comment on a message board. Let's try to avoid bringing hysteria into the conversation. I'm glad you ended up having a working relationship with your mechanic but I don't think it's really relevant here. Your mechanic is not maintaining an open source project. He's fixing your car. Which is a great…

stopped reading at the first sentence.

Stop bringing your personal drama here please.

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