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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

#191

Post by snapetom »

anderspitman wrote: post #142
snapetom wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm sure someone like Selena Gomez is going to get her team to self hosting from her EC2 instance /s The "famous people" care about getting their posts to fans. If you're able to convince and migrate hundreds of millions of teenagers to this self-hosted dream, sure. However, that's just not going to happen.

In this dream, I imagine people like Selena Gomez would pay for a Mastodon account to be hosted by a 3rd party. She would gladly pay thousands of dollars a year for her Twitter account if that was the only way for her to keep it, and not even notice the cost. There will be plenty of Mastodon providers willing to offer five 9s for far less than that.

> five 9s

Lololol. Good lord. Tell me you don't work in product without saying you don't work in product.

She gives zero fucks about Five 9's. Maybe her tech team gives like 1/8 of a fuck, but no more beyond that. She only cares about the number of people she reaches with one tweet/toot/whatever, and simply being faster/self-hosted/data owned/reliable/federated has nothing to do with that.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#192

Post by orgasmicberries »

mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

We hadn't heard of Mastodon before all the Twitter stuff went down. People simply hadn’t been aware of it

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#193

Post by BlueTemplar »

afavour wrote: post #41
mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

> 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…

Not to forget the TwitterAPIpocalypse of 2012 (?), when Twitter heavily restricted its programming interfaces, which decimated the ecology of companies that were built around it, like Flattr (1.0). I surmise that's not unrelated to Mastodon's release in 2016 ?

For instance :

IFTTT forced to remove Twitter triggers to comply with new API policies :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4550625

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#194

Post by slg »

googlryas wrote: post #181
slg wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I guess I set up the 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. But that is still a false dichotomy because…

Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned. Parody accounts that may trick people into thinking they are real accounts will be banned. I don't really see the problem with that. If you ever look at any popular tech related Twitter account, you will see a ton of crypto scams in the replies from people purporting to be vitalic or other famous members of the community. I just can't understand anyon…

>Parody accounts that are labeled as parody accounts aren't banned.

That isn't true[1].

>I just can't understand anyone that lists that as the first gripe or example regarding how he is running things poorly. Elon also lined up at billions of dollars from institutional investors to take Twitter private, and I'm fairly sure they had an understanding of Elon before a week ago. And yet they still gave him billions of dollars.

It was listed as the first gripe because it is objective. Musk said one thing then did another. There are levels of debate you can have about most of his other management issues. There is no debate here. This is a situation in which Musk said Twitter would handle a situation in a certain way then they immediately handled it a different way.

>May I guess that you were an Elon negativist, or a mastodon positivist before there was any mention of Elon buying Twitter?

No. You can look into my post history if you need proof. I am a fan of Tesla, I think they make great cars. However, Musk in the last couple of years has seemingly become more and more detached and destructive.

I think Mastodon is doomed to fail (or at least never succeed) because centralization was not Twitter's main problem and the federated nature of Mastodon can actually exacerbate those real issues.

>Most CEOs of social media companies that reach a billion plus dollar valuation don't have any experience running social media companies either. But somehow they do it.

But they at least usually have worked in media or social media before. Dorsey's and Zuckerberg's qualifications to run their billion-dollar companies was that they grew those companies into a billion dollar entities. Agrawal's qualification was that he worked at Twitter for years before becoming CEO of the company. Musk's qualification is that he has billions of dollars.

>I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about the likelihood of Twitter failing. Would you like to place a friendly wager on it ? I'd happily bet $1 on whether Twitter is dead on basically anytime frame that you would provide less than 5 years.

Nothing I said here is a prediction that Twitter will fail, what failure even means for a company like Twitter, or the timeline that failure might play out over. My point is that failure wasn't a real concern a year ago, now it is, and the only reason for that is Musk's management.

[1] - https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/kathy-griffin-twitter-banned...

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#195

Post by latchkey »

dredmorbius wrote: post #188
latchkey wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that seems like a spammers paradise. Hey, did you hear about this amazing product @insertYourNameHere?

Less so than you might think: 1. DMs can be restricted to followed profiles. 2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair. 3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot. I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for t…

> on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message.

True, it is hilarious to consider that $8 will disincentive spammers.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#196

Post by riffic »

phailhaus wrote: post #183
riffic wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can reach millions of users, billions potentially, with WordPress. My WordPress is also compatible with Mastodon since I installed the ActivityPub plugin. I understand the federated social web has a technobabble aspect to it. I am sorry you aren't with it but that's honestly not my problem.

And that's exactly why Mastodon will never reach mass adoption. That's my only point: Mastodon is for techies. It is not and will never be a viable competitor to centralized social media. The idea that "companies should run their own Mastodon instances" as a way to replace Facebook is absurd.

not asking for that though. The only thing I'd like to see is for content management systems to adopt the protocol for federation since it's a W3C recommendation. smart media and institutional players will do this

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#197

Post by rhaway84773 »

mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

Cards on the table, I don’t think federated Twitter will be a thing. Or at least it’s not a replacement for Twitter, in the forms I’ve seen it so far.

However, in general, just because something didn’t take off initially doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea. Often it just goes to show that inertia is an extremely powerful force. People are often willing to continue with a substandard solution if it’s the one they’re used to or have been using for a while.

And so often a newer, superior, competitor requires the incumbent to make a misstep before they stand a chance at shining.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#198

Post by dredmorbius »

phailhaus wrote: post #67
riffic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

federation works just like email. I don't want just anyone to have a whitehouse.gov address (do you?)

Then what's the point of the closing line "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com "?

"toot.thoughtworks.com" is equivalent to "www.thoughtworks.com" or "mail.thoughtworks.com". It's a hostname for a specific service.

If you want to see the actual activity on the instance, click through the "See What's Happening" link which takes you to the public view:

https://toot.thoughtworks.com/public>

Note that a specific profile's public URL page will be, e.g.,

  https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler
That's the HTTP gateway to the profile "mfowler@toot.thoughtworks.com":

https://toot.thoughtworks.com/@mfowler>

Yes, there are a few concepts to understand. Some six millions of profiles worth of people seem to have worked it out to date.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#199

Post by dredmorbius »

latchkey wrote: post #195
dredmorbius wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less so than you might think: 1. DMs can be restricted to followed profiles. 2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair. 3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot. I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for t…

> on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message. True, it is hilarious to consider that $8 will disincentive spammers.

$8 re-upped for each instance of rapidly-burned account will likely discourage low-return spam, at least. That's more-or-less the principle Metafilter's based on, and it's worked for a few decades.

(MeFi's fee is $5, not $8.)

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#200

Post by dredmorbius »

ngrilly wrote: post #37

Is there any Mastodon managed hosting where you can bring your own domain, a bit like Fastmail but for Mastodon?

There's a list of providers and other suggestions here:

https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...>

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