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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#261

Post by vidarh »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #229
howenterprisey wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google+ is a great example of the point that once a community's platform gets shut down, it's often tough to find another place to meet, and some people don't survive the transition.

Right. So what happened to UseNet-News? Would that not be an ideal federated platform with a standard protocol and everything?

Maintaining federation of USENET was a massive effort. I used to run an NNTP server, and spent way too much time dealing with ensuring we had redundant feeds and kept up with the volume. And on top of that handling spam. It worked well for what it was at the time, but it was nowhere near an ideal federated platform.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#262

Post by sam1r »

m3kw9 wrote: post #246
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…

Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events, you shouldn’t avoid doing something just because there could be a small chance of death(not walking out side to avoid a meteor strike). Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.

>> Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events.

Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example hypothetical “black swan” events?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#263

Post by pessimizer »

smcn wrote: post #103
thrdbndndn wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. You can't call keeping merely the contacts without emails themselves "migration of email provider". It makes no sense. Also, you said "follower[s] don't have to do anything", but somehow you (the followee) on the other hand needs to actively move? What if my follower is on this instance too and they don't actively move? Shouldn't their account disappear (and you lost your follow…

False equivalence, it's a _social network_, and you can, indeed, migrate your social network.

That's mistaking the map for the terrain. It's a networked system for leaving and retrieving messages. It's not a group of friends. The way you expect to migrate a messaging system is by moving the messages.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#264

Post by freedomben »

philippejara wrote: post #234
proactivesvcs wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

f*c*book has been floundering for some years now and is lurching from trying to follow one trend to the next, pouring money into each attempt and everything twitter seems to do causes another exodus. They'll be brought out and then hollowed out, or attempt a major pivot which will be fatal for their global relevance. This is without the spectre of data protection laws offering us more and more protection from the abu…

why are you censoring facebook?

I was wondering that too, and I think my brain may have figured it out. on a quick glance at the way it's written, my brain read "fuckbook" rather than "facebook" since f*c*book aligns with both. If that's right, it's kind of silly IMHO

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#265

Post by i5heu »

seydor wrote: post #257

Weakness of running a decentralized service: no money made, which means you have to give and keep on giving. The solution is to decentralize the hosting itself instead of leeching off the work of a few individuals. Mastodon credentials should use something like a bittorrent/blockchain db. It s ok to lose the posts Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a…

One could argue that instagram and Facebook where not profitable in for many many years too.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#266

Post by [deleted] »

swyx wrote: post #250
shadowgovt wrote: post #162

A major note in the Mastodon fediverse brought down by the fact that it's administered by one person who, despite the fact they are running a social network node, never built up the real world trust connections to find somebody they could share the toil of administration with or tap in when it was time for them to bow out because we are all mortal. The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. T…

yeah, idk if you could count this as a success when by his own admission there's so much user data essentially sited on one single point of failure/compromise.

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#267

Post by mariusor »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #180
mariusor wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I pay a monthly fee to a business for my mail server, and I chose a business that makes data privacy a top selling point. 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.…

Your perspective on "empty calories" social engagement is very narrow in my opinion, because you seem to equate all social interactions by the measure of existing, objectively bad, services. I think that over time the rise of small indie servers that will work on a social graph but in a similar way to email, will prove that "meaningful" social networks can exist, and my personal hope is that they won't be focusing on monetization. I don't see any reason why companies won't be able to build on that and offer you the same guarantees about your data that your email company gives you.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#268

Post by rvz »

proactivesvcs wrote: post #153
rvz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Yes, I said: 'Little to no users' . After looking at it for a couple of years, it is not the typical twitter user that is self hosting their own Mastodon instance and just the same tech-folks that are doing that (unreliably) and sitting on Mastodon. The level of social interaction on Mastodon is so low and limited, th…

I'm following so many accounts that if I don't sign in for three or four days I can barely keep up with my home feed. Almost all of it is interesting, funny, insightful or simply chill discussion. They almost exclusively use the Fediverse, none of them use the Fedi as a second-class citizen. Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother w…

> Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions.

Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy' especially when they occasionally run back to Twitter since they know little social engagement goes on Mastodon. 10 is closer to 0, than 90 and usage is still declining; Hence "Little to no one".

But we both know it is not just that. Not only they can't help using Twitter more, they won't move to Mastodon for the exact same reasons as I said and Twitter's network effect, hence why little to no-one is using Mastodon. The same tech-folks like (Mastodon.technology) are the ones 'self-hosting' these instances and not the regular users, since they don't care enough to even use it.

Not even the one operating Mastodon.technology could handle it. Might as well recentralize back to Mastodon.social just to save itself from the very low levels of social interaction since Mastodon has already repeated the same problems as GNU Social once again.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#269

Post by insane_dreamer »

berkes wrote: post #15
spiderfarmer wrote: post #3

> The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I always suspected this would be a massive problem with Mastodon. I contemplated running a server, but there's no way to know beforehand when you'll be running into a limit, like cost or time. Can you really build a social network on volunteers that invest their own money and time, with little reward?

The tech also doesn't help. It's a "typical" Rails application: large, convoluted, lot's of moving parts, and services, and generally slow as molasses (solved by throwing more hardware at it). As experienced Rails dev(ops), I managed to run and help run an instance, but it's not something done on a friday afternoon, let alone scale up. What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services. I'm thinking about…

Would a pre-installed docker image be a solution to the setup issue? (Doesn't solve performance, of course.)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#270

Post by seydor »

i5heu wrote: post #265
seydor wrote: post #257

Weakness of running a decentralized service: no money made, which means you have to give and keep on giving. The solution is to decentralize the hosting itself instead of leeching off the work of a few individuals. Mastodon credentials should use something like a bittorrent/blockchain db. It s ok to lose the posts Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a…

One could argue that instagram and Facebook where not profitable in for many many years too.

That would be a) false because their creators were having high incomes anyway and b) irrelevant because mastodon will be unprofitable forever
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