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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#151

Post by wizzwizz4 »

EarlKing wrote: post #55
Taek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some sense of the word they are already shut down. Moderation is very heavy on both and certain topics just can't become widely shared. For example, a recent thread by a sex worker had something like 8/30 tweets censored off the platform (despite none of the content being graphic, offensive, or illegal). So sure, Twitter will run for a long time. But it doesn't have very strong guarantees to its users about how it…

Neither does any point on the Fediverse. As long as operators think they can run their site any way they want instead of obeying a common protocol then they're federated in name only. To put it another way: If I can never trust that my email will make it to someone on gmail due to the opaqueness of their spam filters, with no way to be whitelisted by a recipient, then email has been thoroughly decommoditized and cent…

Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation.

I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a pain sometimes.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#152

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

j_k_eter wrote: post #66
cmeacham98 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.

I find the idea that X won't / can't happen on a 3 month timeline, in this political climate, silly. Is there such a thing as stability bias? Because folks had best recalibrate their expectations for rate of change, starting a few months ago. I won't be taking any bets on Facebook, but the thing I'm replying to sounds like 6-months ago thinking.

Depends if X is a tool/cause/symptom of the political climate you are talking about.

Because Twitter is, so I think I side with the guy that said it’s silly to think it’ll shut down soon.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#153

Post by proactivesvcs »

rvz wrote: post #119
arcatech wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Do you have some kind of personal issue with the protocol? There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.

> Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Yes, I said: 'Little to no users' . After looking at it for a couple of years, it is not the typical twitter user that is self hosting their own Mastodon instance and just the same tech-folks that are doing that (unreliably) and sitting on Mastodon. The level of social interaction on Mastodon is so low and limited, th…

I'm following so many accounts that if I don't sign in for three or four days I can barely keep up with my home feed. Almost all of it is interesting, funny, insightful or simply chill discussion. They almost exclusively use the Fediverse, none of them use the Fedi as a second-class citizen. Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#154

Post by Xeoncross »

detaro wrote: post #51
leashless wrote: post #30

Why the hell doesn't Mastadon encrypt data at rest so the admins aren't responsible for user privacy? What the hell ? Is this the 1990s?

I don't think "encryption at rest" is what you want, because it doesn't help you against the admin if the app still can/has to be able to decrypt it? Encryption at rest protects against someone walking away with the database, not an admin.

Encryption isn't mentioned once in the whole Activity Pub spec.

Encryption at rest isn't good enough. E2E should be the default on federated protocols with breakouts for public content only needing to be signed.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#155

Post by proactivesvcs »

registeredcorn wrote: post #98
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…

Just as a small nitpick, there is still a community on Flickr. There are certain elements that Photographers get out of Flickr that we don't get from Instagram, or other platforms. This isn't to say that the service is as big or powerful as it once was, but it has done an adequate, if not satisfactory job, at meeting the needs of its base.

I did go for the jugular a bit :-)

I know a fair few people who were really big Flickr fans back in the day and they lament at how the service has changed, and how its soul was diminished, because of the interests of those who now control it. You're right that it is still a going concern.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#156

Post by wizzwizz4 »

efdee wrote: post #145
importgravity wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The staffers setup the new servers and did all the heavy-lifting. As a user, I only had to point my client from Freenode to Libera (exactly one line change in my client config), run /msg nickserv register to register myself, run /msg chanserv register to register the channels I op-ed, and it was all done. Total time spent was less than 30 minutes. The next few days, others did the same and the community started trick…

And yet userbase got decimated for most channels when moving from Freenode to Libera. Just because it was only 30 minutes (for you or for anyone) doesn't mean people will go through the effort.

The active userbase was not affected very much. (Note that some channels moved to OFTC, not Libera.) The lurker userbase was more than decimated – I think it about halved – but they were barely part of the communities, and there might not even have been anyone sitting behind the IRC clients.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#157

Post by voakbasda »

noasaservice wrote: post #73
loceng wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... the indie RPG scene laments its demise." Where did they move?

Sometimes when communities die or are killed, they don't come back. Nobody knows where to go to re-convene.

This should part of a plan for online organizational continuity. Any community that uses big tech’s services should probably have one.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#158

Post by [deleted] »

rvz wrote: post #102
monkin wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pay for what? It's not about making money. For servers that run Mastodon. > But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance. Most users aren’t interested in contributing anything to the platform. Social media platforms popularity lays in simplicity. No one wants to run anything, just…

This right here. He's right you know. Everyone knows that Mastodon can't handle this amount of users and after 6 years, it's enough to see that by itself it has failed, (unless you count Truth Social as a great example of a Mastodon usage that has more users than Mastodon itself in less than a year) It is not early days anymore and no non-technical user is interested in hosting their own servers for chatting with ano…

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#159

Post by proactivesvcs »

Kye wrote: post #133
rvz wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I look at all of the interests and discussions and shitposts that are on my home and local feeds, watch the interactions between mutuals and people argue, learn, laugh and join in shared hobbies and simply cannot fathom how this can be "failed". All this and if I turned off my anti-virus I wouldn't see any adverts and am never subjected to abusive interests or dark patterns. How is this failure? It's what I want from the Internet. It's real, actual people.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#160

Post by KvanteKat »

bondarchuk wrote: post #54
berkes wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mastodon has a migration path for users to move to other instances. So when the server admins allow it (i.e. don't just shutdown, or kick someone off) moving is rather easy. Today, several in my mastodon timeline mentioned they finished the move. But without them mentioning, I, an outstander (i'm on another instance) wouldn't notice it. What will happen, though, is that a portion of the users won't migrate. Either be…

Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a cryptographic verification based on a private key held by the user, so that they can prove to other servers/users that they are the same account as one that existed on a server that has shut down already? Is there something like that in Mastodon?

It doesn't involve cryptography, but mastodon has for at least a couple of years supported link-verification in profiles (it basically checks if a link back to your mastodon profile exists on a page linked on your profile), so a linking to a page that only you credibly control (say, a personal website) is the de-facto system of decentralized user-verification on mastodon.

Edit: supported since 2018 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8703

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