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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

#31

Post by TeMPOraL »

nimbius wrote: post #26
mensetmanusman wrote: post #6

Not trivial. Slack/teams are built to handle confidential communications with legal oversight.

the article is from 2022 but it may as well be from 2012. Back about a decade ago there was a huge push in companies toward "employee engagement" and social media was seen as the next big thing. about a bakers dozen companies (trello, atlassian, the usual scumbags) showed up to pitch their version of a sterile, enforced, monitored and legally blessed version of "twitter" for the office. GenZ ignored it, GenX abhorred…

Last I checked the current iteration was discount Facebook for corporate, aka. Yammer.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#32

Post by parrellel »

grzes wrote: post #9

why is hacker-news flooded lately with mastodon-related content? it's irritating

Musk has been running around being the Internet's favorite clown for the last ~10 days and is causing massive disruption. Mastodon is the twitter competitor, and as a federated product has a bunch of independent uncoordinated cheerleaders.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#33

Post by MBCook »

sdiacom wrote: post #21
mensetmanusman wrote: post #6

Not trivial. Slack/teams are built to handle confidential communications with legal oversight.

I don't think the suggestion is for Mastodon to replace internal communication, but to use it as a social media outlet for your organization.

Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim.

But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not.

Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake.

It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the government.

Seems like a good idea to me. And if you like federation it sounds better than a semi-official instance everyone uses that verifies things, sort of recreating a mini-Twitter “super” instance that is “more equal” than the others.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#34

Post by anderspitman »

Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone.

In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new selfhosting server. You have apps for Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, calendars, whatever.

The key pieces missing are simple tunneling services (think ngrok with a GUI designed for selfhosters), easier domain name management, and porting apps to run on phones. The most difficult is the last one but I'm hopeful that virtualization will take care of that in the near future[0], and maybe things like Wasm in the long run.

EDIT: PS - If you're interested in making this world a reality, join us over at https://forum.indiebits.io/

[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has...

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#35

Post by jefftk »

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…

Social media is better when the people you want to interact with are there, so when everyone else is moving is an unusually good time to move.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#36

Post by worldsayshi »

grzes wrote: post #9

why is hacker-news flooded lately with mastodon-related content? it's irritating

A related thought I've had a number of times:

One enormous consequence of how social media globalization works is that the attention span of the whole world becomes centralised. We can only talk about one thing or a few things at a time. Those become the hyper focus of the whole internet. In every forum those topics seep in. Trying to resist "the current thing" becomes very exhausting. It's very hard to even talk about local issues when there are a few big issues that draws everyone's attention. I feel like this is one of the most dramatic changes for the last two decennia.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#38

Post by Arubis »

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…

It was a good idea two weeks ago as risk mitigation. Now the bad thing risk mitigation was meant to mitigate is happening.

It's also a good idea not to build a house on a floodplain, or in an area with high risk of fire. People tend to do so anyway until the area floods or burns.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#40

Post by rambambram »

MBCook wrote: post #33
sdiacom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the suggestion is for Mastodon to replace internal communication, but to use it as a social media outlet for your organization.

Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim. But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not. Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake. It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the g…

Can't a domain name, webserver and email address do the same thing? Or am I missing something?
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