The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off • Hacker News Board

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#161

Post by carapace » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 5:35 PM UTC

Whenever you hear the words "efficient" or "inefficient" you should always have in the fore of your mind the question "For what goal?" or in other words "By what metric?"

A lot can hide in the unspoken assumptions behind the unqualified use of the idea of efficiency.

In this case the comparison of "efficiency" of Twitter vs. Mastodon is pretty meaningless. There are as many goals as there are users and moderators and (in Twitter's case) management and investors, eh? Of course, there are broad groupings and shared interests, but by and large the folks using Twitter and/or Mastodon have different goals.

It reminds me of comparisons between industrial farming and small-scale ecological farming: industrial farming is more efficient at creating massive amounts of some kinds of products, but it literally cannot produce any of some other kinds of products. (E.g. you can't get Alpine strawberries in the supermarket because they start to lose structural integrity the very moment you pick them. The only way to get them is to grow them close to your kitchen.)

- - - -

As a bit of a tangent, I like to reflect how evolution has no goals therefore speaking of the efficiency of living systems is meaningless. Evolution is a chemical tautology.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#162

Post by kazinator » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search.

When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results.

For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago.

If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get nothing.

BUT: if I use the URL /tags/lisp, bam: recent stuff appears! On either instance. The same if I see the hash tag in a post and click on it.

Users are going to join Mastodon and try to use the search box to find content related to their interests, and falsely conclude that there is nothing, or next to nothing. That is going to cause some nonzero user attrition.

It's not just a problem for tags like #lisp, but mainstream things like #kids, #parenting, #dogs, what have you.

My home instance comes up with nothing for any of these searches, with or without hash. Not quite; for "dogs" it finds a user named "Elon Musk F___s Dogs" as its only search result.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#163

Post by tomrod » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

phpisthebest wrote: post #122

uneekname wrote: post #4

What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance. Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!

This could also be Mastodon / ActivityPub's version of Eternal September

Of course it is. While early adopters cringe, Eternal September means your platform is growing.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#164

Post by proactivesvcs » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

irusensei wrote: post #55

HollowEyes wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am partially surprised that the reading portal is the same as the authoring one. It would feel better if we had one great feed reader, and an authoring pumping station. The blurred lines makes it more difficult to comprehend as much. Who moderates offshore content?

> Who moderates offshore content Whoever is in the pilot seat and that’s beautiful. Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps. Also server-wide block done by administrators. If I’m not mistaken the largest mastodon instance is Pawoo.net and that’s basically a japanese board for posting controversial hentai artwork. Pawoo.net is blacklisted from most popular…

> Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps

I believe - although have not verified lately - that Tusky will not connect to some specific instances that host degenerate people.

I use Fedilab instead.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#165

Post by SoftTalker » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 6:02 PM UTC

Kiro wrote: post #106

uneekname wrote: post #4

What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance. Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!

My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.

Yep. If Twitter really founders, Meta or Google will roll out something to replace it. Most Twitter users already have accounts with one or both, so it would be a very low-friction switch, and they certainly have the resources to do it. Mastodon will never catch on with the general public, for the same reasons that Linux has not.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#166

Post by geek_at » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 6:03 PM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #162

Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search. When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results. For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago. If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get no…

for me as a server admin I hate how incredibly annoying it is to set up a new instance. Even the docker setup is very poorly explained (as in not at all in the official documentation) and there are so many subsystems needed for the setup. There are many third party setup guides but most are so outdated that they don't work anymore

It's not self contained and after running an instance for a while you can be in update hell because the containers might need newer versions and you need to read up on every service and how to update that.

I much more appreciate the gitea approach. Simple setup, self contained but can be extended with external databases if needed

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#167

Post by SoftTalker » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 6:04 PM UTC

sandyarmstrong wrote: post #132

Kiro wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.

In my circles I'm seeing mass exodus. It's not just the tinkerers and the anarchists. I'm not surprised about the uptake in the open source community, after all I remember identi.ca being a lovely network for GNOME back in the day. But I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts. Sure, many of them are dual-posting. But I still…

> I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts.

Are you seeing your mom and dad moving over? Or your teenage kid and her friends? Or your non-tech friends?

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#168

Post by thrown_22 » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 6:20 PM UTC

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #153

turtleyacht wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank-you. I see it is part of Professor Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World . And that is part of a series of 49 books, The Princeton Economic History of the Western World. Definitely sounds like a reference gold mine.

My (limited) understanding of the book is that basically during the 19C in Britain, poor uneducated (and unproductive) people died off leaving space for the middle class to grow. Which leads to the conclusion that killing the ooor leads to economic growth. As a thesis it may be short of ... something. I may have misunderstood the tweet of the review of the article based on the book. Anyway, my general conclusion is t…

Rather the opposite actually. During the 19th century for reasons that have nothing to do with demography the British learned how to use the poor who would have died to do productive work instead. Then for reasons that have everything to do with child mortality people stopped having 7 children per woman _before_ contraception became widely available. This is the reason why France is smaller than Germany today. Their child mortality decreased faster than Germany's.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#169

Post by Someone » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 6:24 PM UTC

thrown_22 wrote: post #48

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well 20 miles from a navigable river looks a lot like most of populated Europe and China... But I absolutely take the point - anything that can fit in an online comment is a gross simplification- especially for "farming since invention of agriculture". Also the 20 mile is not a hard limit - it's easy to envisage some kind of system where I grow my cash crops near transport like river or coast, and sell them on a trad…

Navigable for a barge and navigable for a canoe are two very different things. The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently. They also had the Nile which isn't _in_ Egypt, but _is_ Egypt. China by comparison is three major rivers which change course frequently…

> The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently

I don’t see why the southern shore of the river would be easier to keep supplied from those rivers than the northern one. So, if the empire ended there because of supply issues, wouldn’t it end a short distance north of the river?

Also, wouldn’t those rivers only help supply from other border areas, not from the much larger inner parts of the empire?

I would think those rivers just are natural boundaries because they provide some protection against invading enemies.

Re: The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

#170

Post by hinkley » Sat, Nov 12, 2022, 6:25 PM UTC

geek_at wrote: post #166

kazinator wrote: post #162

Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search. When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results. For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago. If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get no…

for me as a server admin I hate how incredibly annoying it is to set up a new instance. Even the docker setup is very poorly explained (as in not at all in the official documentation) and there are so many subsystems needed for the setup. There are many third party setup guides but most are so outdated that they don't work anymore It's not self contained and after running an instance for a while you can be in update…

I have a situation at work where someone keeps reporting CVEs to me and I don’t think they get that our docker base image gets automatically rebuilt every so many days and picks up all the fixed from Alpine. If we do nothing that window will close itself in a few days. So do you think we need to drop everything and work on this or just wait?

Sounds like Mastodon is missing some engineering discipline and maybe this is a good time for some to show up. Fixing some of this stuff before Twitter gets even worse would be a good thing.