171–180 of 604 posts
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Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
Google isn't really a good example, they love killing off services on a whim. Meta closing down Facebook would be much more... dramatic, shall we say.
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…
Well, where do you expect your data to be stored? In the ether?
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Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something. Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth" and so on, looking at you AWS).
Because most people don't want to pay for something that they (think) can get for free. The other problem is that charging $1/month is a practical pain in the ass. For micropayments, processors will easily take 20-30% of that.
Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO.
- Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.
- Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.
- People don't want to self-host.
The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single controller.
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…
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Google isn't really a good example, they love killing off services on a whim. Meta closing down Facebook would be much more... dramatic, shall we say.
MySpace and AIM might be better examples then.
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Google isn't really a good example, they love killing off services on a whim. Meta closing down Facebook would be much more... dramatic, shall we say.
MySpace and AIM might be better examples then.
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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…
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.
Tweets are microblogs. RSS technology is fine for publishing them. The Twitter client only needs to be an RSS reader. Replies, retweets, and likes are empty calories for end users. They're the engagement bait social media uses to power an attention economy.
The fediverse copied the wrong features. There's no point for it to have an attention economy because no one is monetizing the attention. Therefore there's no need for the empty calorie features, and no need for my data to be on someone else's server.