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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

#201

Post by phailhaus »

riffic wrote: post #196
phailhaus wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're on the wrong post then, because I've been responding to the article which is arguing that companies should switch to Mastodon over traditional social media. This isn't a thread about Mastodon in general.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#202

Post by phailhaus »

dredmorbius wrote: post #198
phailhaus wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You just used the words "HTTP gateway" while trying to explain how to just view a profile. This is an absolute non-starter if Mastodon is going to compete with Facebook or Twitter with nontechnical users. Do you not see how comically user-hostile this is?

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#203

Post by googlryas »

slg wrote: post #194
googlryas wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 do…

Yes it is true.

The rules[0] state:

> What is required under this policy?

> To avoid confusing others about an account’s affiliation, parody, commentary, and fan accounts must distinguish themselves in BOTH their account name and bio

In the screenshots[1], you can see that he said the account is a parody in the bio, but not the name. Only specifying it in the bio means that you would look like a real account when tweet replying.

My point is that failure isn't a more real concern than it was previously, except for, largely, people who already hate Elon, or, perhaps in your case, for people who are misinformed about policy rules and violations.

[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/parody-accoun...

[1] https://twitter.com/connorratliff/status/1589473721030701058...

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#204

Post by taylodl »

NegativeK wrote: post #89
taylodl wrote: post #66

The Disney company should heed this device and call their server(s) Mousetodon. I think they'd kill it. Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. They could even have different servers for different sets of fanbases to focus on - Marvel, Star Wars, etc.

> Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. God, please, fuck no.

:)

I'm just pointing out how ridiculous it is to think every organization should be running their own Mastodon server!

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#205

Post by dredmorbius »

nemo44x wrote: post #63

This is such backwards thought. You don't want to make your social network presence a place people have to go to. You want your presence to be where people go to. Centralized social networks give people who publish content massive audience potential. Running your own Website for this completely misses the point and you might as well just add a forum to your site.

Actually, no.

Since Mastodon is federated, running your own instance is largely transparent to most Mastodon and Fediverse users. You're simply another profile on another instance. Content will federate.

What operating your own server does provide is:

1. Control over your own services. Notably, over what other instances can federate to it --- Adam Davidson (ex of New Yorker, NYT, NPR, etc.) discovered this yesterday: https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377>. But also moderation and content policies as well as operational and provisioning decisions.

2. An additional indicia of who you really are. BigCo@FlippantMastodonInstance.Whatevs might or might not indicate strong branding. BigCo@BigCo.TLD (especially where BigCo.TLD is already strongly established) is stronger branding.

3. For those not yet using Mastodon, the self-hosted server will be a single point at which content can be viewed. Note that this is marked distinction from the practice of the past decade or so of relying on social media services which were effectively walled gardens: Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and the like.

4. DMs are visible to an instance's admin. Self-hosting means that the organisation would control that particular exposure as well.

Much as BigCo would be expected to operate or present its own website or blog, and frequently its own email server (or at least domains pointed at hosted services), so too with self-hosted Mastodon.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#206

Post by fragmede »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #171
fragmede wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs. Sure, the site itself looks the same, the logo is the same, but there's a ton of turmoil for the people behind the scenes. Not everything is run by computers, there are a lot of humans in the loop for the day-to-day operations of the site. The core product of "post tweet" and ever…

> I'd say firing half the company, which includes the content moderation team very meaningful. Especially to those who just lost their jobs. Well, OK, assuming this all pans out to be true[0], that's one hell of a botched firing, which apparently (see [0]) Musk/Twitter is trying to back-track on... but that happened in the last few days. The Internet drama about Musk and Twitter started months ago, and reached its pe…

Yeah I mean I'm sure the facts will clear after the dust settles, but for now we get hottakes based on real Tweets, fake Tweets, Internet rumors, and lies. Some of them won't age well (including mine).

> Or, in a hypothetical world ... do you imagine the Internet getting any less hysteric? Do you imagine headlines saying...

Less hysterical? No. As far as headlines, I can totally see both; headlines saying it's a surprise, along with a different newspaper framing it negatively. (I think I heard the shadowban group survived unscathed.)

> I'm denying the hysteria is in any way correlated with anything Musk actually does.

I'd say it's quite correlated as it's all based off of things Musk has done (eg suspending users impersonating him) or said/tweeted (proclaimed that free speech will reign supreme). Normally I'd say saying things and doing this are two separate matters (talk is, after all, cheap), except that this is a social media site, who's entire purpose is for saying things. For Tesla it's easy to point at the number of Model 3's produced/wk or Autopilot's shortcomings and set aside things Musk has said for what he's done or not done. Twitter, on the other hand, is a place for talk, so when Musk says he's a free speech absolutist, and then proceeds to buy Twitter, people take notice, especially at junctures where it turns out he's not.

There is a lot of stuff about Mastodon flying around, which isn't really related to Musk's speech/actions, and supports your "life of its own" part though.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#207

Post by riffic »

phailhaus wrote: post #201
riffic wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You're on the wrong post then, because I've been responding to the article which is arguing that companies should switch to Mastodon over traditional social media. This isn't a thread about Mastodon in general.

it's a shorthand to say "Mastodon" since no one really knows about the stuff under the hood (ActivityPub and the federated social web)

Yes everyone (especially those taking public money) should build AP into their existing web infra like their content management systems.

it's a complete failure of policy that all of these public status communications are made into centralized services with hostile ownership. for this, I mean your local police department and fire department, library and mayor and all of those groups.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#208

Post by snapetom »

judge2020 wrote: post #135
snapetom wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The self-hosting argument shows how out of touch fediverse developers are. Try explaining to the influencer celeb why they should self-host. In fact, just try explaining to them they need to pick a mastodon instance, any instance. "it's so easy." No it's not.

A good solution I can see is "choose an interest", with each public mastodon instance having some cheeky emoji and tagline in a list. So if someone typed "makeup" they might filter to the mastodon instance "beauty.social", instead of needing to find beauty.social before even getting started with creating an account.

Then they type "clubbing" or "cars" or "" or whatever and see a shit ton of other instances they get to choose from.

This is a *BAD THING* and it's not surprising people here on HN don't see that.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#209

Post by anderspitman »

seydor wrote: post #177
Saris wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's still way too complex for something that wants to be widely used. It should just be an app on your phone or PC.

or at least that server hosts can support easily like they do with wordpress

That's an interesting point actually. Are there any yunohost providers out there?

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#210

Post by anderspitman »

snapetom wrote: post #191
anderspitman wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does being this abrasive generally result in conversations you feel are productive?
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