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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#181

Post by colatkinson »

orblivion wrote: post #161
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…

> 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. Do you mean that part of the protocol allows for a migration process that includes changing who your follows are pointing at? (assuming all servers involved are up to date and have this feature) I.e. did your account automatically start following your f…

Yeah, this is how it works. I don't know the technical details/internal terminology, but I've definitely had a few accounts I follow switch servers for various reasons. It was basically just "oh hey so-and-so's handle changed" from my perspective, which is kinda neat.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#182

Post by rco8786 »

qznc wrote: post #63
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.

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+ as an example

It's probably a better example of a service that never got off the ground.

Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their current cash positions alone.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#183

Post by SkyMarshal »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #44
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…

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.

>but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable.

He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#184

Post by remram »

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 is different because mastodon.technology will keep operating until December 1st. This leaves them plenty of time to organize a move by discussing it on the platform like they always have.

They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#185

Post by walls »

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…

It sounds like the only actual advantage is 'you get to keep the same account'?

That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care about.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#186

Post by robertlagrant »

zeroclip wrote: post #76
asim wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is where blockchain ends up shining, since there are economic incentives to running a node.

I wonder if for groups up to a certain size, every client could hold all of the data for the group. I think clients do this anyway for caching purposes, but it would mean that as long as any client still had the data, the room wouldn't vanish.

It doesn't scale so well, but if there were an easy ability to (say) plug in an S3 bucket URL for offloading older media, then it might work for quite a while.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#187

Post by chimeracoder »

qznc wrote: post #63
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.

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...

> Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet

Despite (and in contrast to) the absolute massive marketing effort that Google put into Google+ right from launch, it never achieved mainstream success as anything other than an OAuth login tool. That doesn't mean nobody used it, but it was always niche.

It's not a proper comparison for Twitter or Facebook, which grew organically and are both mainstream successes as social networks.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#188

Post by InitEnabler »

pmarreck wrote: post #97

why is the maintenance cost of a Mastodon instance so high? What is the technology stack?

Mastodon was created using the Ruby on Rails framework. Your able to quickly write applications at the cost of overhead from all the moving parts and the Ruby language in general (Though in recent years ruby has improved with the introduction of JIT into it's codebase).

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#189

Post by remram »

thrown_22 wrote: post #59
EarlKing wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just butt in at this point to note that 'federated' systems are more or less FidoNet and Usenet warmed over, neither of which managed to overtake commercial systems, and in the latter case was rendered useless by spam... much like Mastodon and friends which are rendered useless by racism and porn. Speaking of which... there's supposed to be a Mastodon Server Covenant(tm)(c)(pat. pending) in regards to such matte…

>racism and porn. That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.

And let's not act like Twitter isn't full of those to this day...

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#190

Post by wizzwizz4 »

noirscape wrote: post #56
knewter wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox is a frontend that works atop either mastodon, pleroma, or the rebased backend 2) https://github.com/soapbox-pub/rebased the rebased backend is a fork of pleroma but it's much better maintained than pleroma

I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a technical decision he forced through after it was deemed to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch of alternate endpoints…

> There's also a couple of PR reasons to not want to associate with him, but those are largely off-topic.

They're more than PR reasons if you're one of his "wrong sorts"; personally, I'm not confident trusting (for practical reasons) or comfortable using (for emotional reasons) a piece of software whose MDfL doesn't think I should exist.

It's probably off-topic for this discussion, but it's important to keep in mind if you're building a little community on the Fediverse: your choice of software ties your community's culture – at least partially – to the community of the developers. Your users will want to submit bug reports, and so on.

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