Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

berk.es

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 219 posts

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

#181

Post by andreyk »

luckylion wrote: post #45
andreyk wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a si…

Are there stats on how much of the network uses managed hosts like MastoHost? That sounds like a giant target. It's nice that they allow off-migration and don't lock your community in.

I don't think it a large proportion; the vast majority of users are on a few large instances such as Mastodon.social which are not via MastoHost. The owner also stated he would not want to host more than a 4th of all instances

https://masto.host/the-25-percent-commitment/

We will likely migrate to our own cloud setup once size gets stable.

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

#182

Post by citizenkeen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #167
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, but they weren’t the first ones on Twitter, either.

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

#183

Post by fragmede »

CM30 wrote: post #158
irusensei wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twitter won’t ban you for personal reasons. Can you vouch the same for a server admin?

I'm pretty sure they'll ban you if it's 'inconvenient' not to, like if a company raises potential legal hell, your posts get mass reported, you end up in the midst of a huge internet controversy/witchhunt, etc. A large company is no more immune to that than a small one, or a community run site would be. And at least with an individual or small company/group, you have someone to put your case to in that situation. Som…

I assure you, individuals, especially ones with the tiniest bit of power, as just as capable of telling you to "get fucked". Some of them work at Twitter or Facebook. Others run your HOA or are university professors. Or Mastodon servers.

The server admin can kick you off just because they feel like it. At least with a large public platform there's the possibility of public exposure of bad behavior.

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

#184

Post by syntheweave »

yborg wrote: post #180
phpisthebest wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well this is the problem, USENET, like Activity pub was a PROTOCOL not a platform. Eternal September lead the the collapse of USENET largely because no company could control it, thus it got harder and harder to manage / control in a way the normies wanted, and governments wanted. USENET today is primary binary transfers, i.e the high seas of the internet. It is not largely a communications system anymore. We are alre…

"Eternal September" did not lead to the 'collapse' of USENET. It was largely replaced by web-based solutions in more user-friendly domains like AOL. And USENET eventually largely ended up controlled by a few large entities (ISPs) that had the resources to support the huge message volumes. Since there was largely no monetization mechanisms people would support for the needed resources, freely available NNTP servers qu…

One major way in which "this time is different" is that the financial cost of the hosting is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and doesn't drive consolidation so strongly towards larger-cap players. It's not quite to the point of "too cheap to meter", but definitely in the realm of where donations can work.

And the underlying software has had the time to work out a lot of the nuances of this design and how to get it to a larger scale successfully. It could still break if the whole planet took up ActivityPub, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the ideal than what happened with the pre-Web protocols.

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

#185

Post by fsflover »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #129
CM30 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, like when using most websites? If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. If you use independently run forums and community sites, you're trusting the people running those places. Self hosting your own instance is great when possible (and I definitely think it should be pos…

> If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. I don't direct people to my HN profile. I don't rely on that for identity. I don't try to build an audience on HN. > If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. These are ad-funded businesses, they have a financial incentive not to ban everyone they dislike. They also have a t…

> They also have a track record

Indeed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31782952

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

#186

Post by sandyarmstrong »

SoftTalker wrote: post #167
sandyarmstrong wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm about 40 and I don't know anyone whose mom or dad is on Twitter. They're all on Facebook still.

Teenagers and even 20-somethings are already a lost cause for Twitter. They're on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.

And yes, I'm seeing artists, writers, and other non-tech people moving over and finding instances that better suit them.

My friends who consume Twitter as a passive way to be entertained by celebrities aren't moving yet. I'm not sitting here trying to say that Mastodon is a drop-in replacement for Twitter for everybody. But I am surprised and encouraged by how easy it has been for me and many others to find a better experience.

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

#187

Post by tedunangst »

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…

Mastodon search is intentionally broken as some sort of abuse deterrent. Like you can't search for Fetterman and then reply to every post with an angry rant. Of course, also makes it impossible to find good content. This is somehow considered a feature.

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

#188

Post by berkes »

luckylion wrote: post #108
dsr_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Suppose that everyone who participated ran their own server, population 1. Then choosing to block other servers would be equivalent to blocking other people, which we agree is a good thing. Now someone comes up with an adblock list: subscribe to it, and these servers will not bother you. It's probably not perfect, but it improves your experience a lot. If you don't like it, switch to another, or don't subscribe to an…

Is it public which servers an instance is blocking / what servers they are federating with?

Most servers even have an API endpoint for this.

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

#189

Post by berkes »

dbrgn wrote: post #63

"My honey would cost over €10 a jar if I'd pay my time." Locally made honey (i.e. not from South America) in Switzerland usually costs significantly more than 10€ :)

Author here. I did not go into this, but it really is a problem that I, and most of my fellow hobby beekeepers undercharge. That we don't count our hours into the price means that the few Beekeepers who do it professionally, have a hard time charging proper prices.

So I'm happy to hear Swiss prices are better. Though, having lived and worked there a summer, I guess it's still relatively cheap. The price of a coffee....

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

#190

Post by denton-scratch »

hinkley wrote: post #171
denton-scratch wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://acoup.blog/2019/07/12/collections-the-lonely-city-pa... Brett says that moving grain by road would double the cost for every 100 miles. He has quite a few articles on premodern farming, and may have given a different figure in other articles.

> by road Roman roads were high tech for the era and those were still pretty bumpy. A modern road is much more efficient. Bouncing over uneven terrain not only damages the products and veg it also causes wear and tear on the cart, the animals, and the driver. Also doubling isn’t a bad thing for the first couple of multiples. Each doubling increases the supply by a factor of four on open terrain. It’s no accident that…

Travelling by horse and cart can't be much faster than 30 miles per day. So even if you're only 30 miles away, you have a day to get there, a day at the market, and a day to get back. That's 3 days you're not working on the farm. You and the horse that pulls the cart, which of course also needs feeding, and whose day-job is ploughing.
Post reply on HN