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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

#151

Post by anderspitman »

alexb_ wrote: post #128
dmonitor wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I completely agree. Which is why tunneling should be built-in to having a domain name. It should be easier than a phone number. You buy a domain from a domain seller and pay them $5/mo to provide tunneling. All the user needs to understand is:

* I install the app

* App requests access to your domain so it can set up appname.yourdomain.com

* I grant permission and we're live.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#152

Post by afavour »

jimbob45 wrote: post #122
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…

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.

Maybe you can explain to me the way in which Twitter was deeply unpredictable before Musk took over because I don't really see it. I agree that it was a badly run company but in a way that meant it didn't really change very much about its product in the last few years. That's what I mean about predictable and boring. If you looked at Twitter as product in 2017 and looked at it in 2022 you wouldn't see a whole lot of difference.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#154

Post by googlryas »

slg wrote: post #137
googlryas wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses. What exactly are the dangers of using Twitter if it might stop existing say 3 years from now?

>Let's assume that Elon decides to burn 44 billion instead of running a mostly successful business like he's generally done in the past with his other businesses. Why set up this false dichotomy? Elon might burn down his $44b investment in an attempt to run Twitter as a mostly successful business. Running a car company and running a social media company are not the same skill set. It is entirely possible, and seems m…

I don't think it's a false dichotomy because based on the statements of 85% of the people on hacker news, you would think that they have all the right answers for running twitter, and Elon is simply not following their advice. So if he fails, even if it is well intentioned, it is only because he is boneheaded enough to not listen to the geniuses on hacker news and reddit.

Elon has successfully run more than just a car business in a wide variety of fields.

There are free apps that let you archive your Twitter feed, and there are free apps that let you find messed it on users from their Twitter account. I'm sure those tools would get even better and easier to use if the writing was on the wall that Twitter is going down.

What you say about personal investment is true, but it is true about literally everything. If you personally invest in Macedon, I messed it on fails, then you have wasted your time and all of your work is worthless.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#155

Post by anderspitman »

rakoo wrote: post #145
seydor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

should be wordpress-level easy at least. But last i checked it wasnt easy. Otherwise , mastodon hosters will become sneaky corporate spies, ad injectors and data resellers

Install yunohost. Clicks in a UI. Install pleroma. Or mastodon. Or pixelfed (for images). Or peertube (for videos). Or plume (for blogging). Clicks in a UI.

But what about step 0: have a working Linux installation with root privileges, and understand all the security implications of operating said installation.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#156

Post by afavour »

EricE wrote: post #112
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…

>Before Musk's takeover Twitter was reliable, predictable and somewhat boring. In what ways? And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?

> In what ways?

Twitter's product has been static for years, barring perhaps the introduction of Twitter Spaces, which has barely made a dent in usage (as far as I can see, anyway). I personally regard this as a negative: I think that they should have been innovating more. But if I were a major brand looking at my advertising commitments I'd probably be fine with it.

> And in what ways do you think federated servers that don't agree on what rules to apply and lack any sort of mechanism for global, centralized control will make Mastodon reliable, predictable or even somewhat boring?!?

I don't personally think Mastodon is the answer so I'm probably not well positioned to answer this. But if my organization sets up its own Mastodon instance I'm free to ignore what the larger Mastodon ecosystem is doing, if I want to. It is under my control and can't be bought out by a memelord playing a prank gone wrong.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#157

Post by Saris »

rakoo wrote: post #145
seydor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

should be wordpress-level easy at least. But last i checked it wasnt easy. Otherwise , mastodon hosters will become sneaky corporate spies, ad injectors and data resellers

Install yunohost. Clicks in a UI. Install pleroma. Or mastodon. Or pixelfed (for images). Or peertube (for videos). Or plume (for blogging). Clicks in a UI.

That's still way too complex for something that wants to be widely used. It should just be an app on your phone or PC.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#158

Post by afavour »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #99
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…

To date there has been no change in my Twitter experience.

No but changes have been announced. Fundamentally altering what the "blue tick" means alone will give e.g. major brands pause. As of Tuesday (or whenever they actually launch it) someone will be able to register the Twitter account @C0ca_cola and pay $8 to give it a verified checkmark. If I were Coca-Cola I'd be quite concerned about that.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#159

Post by TeMPOraL »

Spivak wrote: post #149
TeMPOraL wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> by irrational fear and hatred towards Musk All your other point are good but this one surprises me. I think at this point people can have very rational fear and hatred of this guy. He's a 50 year old man with literally the world view of and politics a 14 year old edgelord on Fortnite but with enough money and following to do real damage with that. The biggest fears people seem to have is that he actually succeeds a…

> All your other point are good but this one surprises me.

I'll tell you where it comes from. I used to like Musk in early SpaceX / first Falcon landing / Tesla Model S era. Then I disconnected from the news a bit, for a couple of years, and started to pay more attention recently (~last year). I saw constant hatred of Musk on-line. I tried to investigate what he did to make people so upset, and besides a name calling here and there, I found literally nothing.

On the contrary, what I found is smart people who I used to respect retweeting or posting trivially disprovable soundbites like the whole apartheid money thing. I haven't seen an argument that wasn't overblown to ridiculous proportions.

This is not to say Musk didn't turn into villain. I'm not convinced either way, and I'm definitely not trying to claim he's pristine and good. I may have missed some important stories in ~2018-2021. What I am convinced about, though, is the whole anti-Musk crowd literally went high on their own bullshit, and is a perfect illustration how it ends when you have a feedback loop of people one-upping increasingly exaggerated claims.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#160

Post by incomingpain »

rcfox wrote: post #107
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.)

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

I tried to keep less specific because it doesn't matter to a great deal. We both lack a tardis and cannot change the past.

https://archive.ph/0JFR9

I'm not a gab user, I got an awesome username but it's a shitty echo chamber worse than anywhere else. Fundamentally "Gab" forked mastodon because masotodon banned them off the fediverse. But more importantly mastodon made it clear they do not represent free speech and have the ability to remove political opponents.

There's tons of speech on GAB and what percentage is 'hate speech'? can you even define hate speech really? It's not all speech on the platform. The correct way to read the blog is they banned their political opponents because they have free speech policies. This was a huge mistake for mastodon. Something they can basically never recover from.

One of the persistent issues in political polarization has been labelling your political opponents. Republicans are all nazis?

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