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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#301

Post by ndriscoll »

naavis wrote: post #81
elikoga wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds what, why? The load is hardly that high.

For reference, based on quick Googling, Twitter publishes around 10 000 tweets per second on average.

i.e. my laptop could handle the write load. A retired nerd with a real server they put in a data center for bandwidth could easily run that level of traffic on 2022 hardware.

For reference my work laptop (8 logical cores, so 4+HT? 32GB RAM) can handle 100k rows/second sustained inserts into postgres 14 with some batch jobs I'm working on. You can buffer http requests into batches and easily handle way more than 10k/s on a server while still providing synchronous semantics and reasonable latency to the client (e.g. flush batches every 10-100 ms).

I doubt Mastodon is designed for that kind of scalability, but most techies could probably afford to run Twitter as a hobby if they knew what they're doing and they weren't trying to do all the analytics and advertising stuff to monetize it/just wanted to provide the service.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#302

Post by klabb3 »

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…

> Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with.

I'm not a Mastodon user, but this is haunting. Just like shady data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds" are running VPN nodes, subreddits etc, this architecture is practically designed for malicious actors. It wouldn't surprise me if it's already being used this way on other nodes.

To be clear, in 2005 this would have been great, tech is moving fast so one has to remain humble when critizising architectural decisions. Nevertheless, today we can't trust private data in hands of benevolent (and often de-facto anonymous) volunteer actors, if we want scale and security in the decentralized (or even federated) world.

We have had enormous progress in applied cryptography, both in social apps (Signal, Matrix) and defi (some successes, many failures to learn from). We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it. Doesn't mean that all data on a social app must be private, but DMs and invite only "groups" should be.

Currently, the typical website with per-node password auth doesn't satisfy these constraints, since credential harvesting is trivial. It's very difficult to build E2EE web apps and even if, users have no habit of keeping secrets on-device. The client itself needs to be vetted and accessed securely. Perhaps Matrix is best positioned in this space.

(Please correct me if I got any details wrong)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#303

Post by intelVISA »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #49
sneak wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1500/mo does not even begin to cover a single 24/7 oncall devops person’s rate.

To be fair, that devops person would probably not need to do anything 23 out of those 24 hours on 6 out of 7 of those days. If you use sane software, running a server is not a lot of work.

What if I'm stuck in YAML hell?!

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#304

Post by tootie »

guywithahat wrote: post #235
tootie wrote: post #34

The solution to silicon valley hegemony just isn't decentralization. It's non-profit leadership. Think Wikipedia. Think NPR. The model doesn't even really need to change from an ad-based revenue model so long as there isn't a bullwhip at the backs of execs demands grow or die. Just keep revenue as close to break even as possible with enough cushion for a downturn.

I don't think Wikipedia and NPR have aged that well though, there are lots of topics where they're essentially (or literally) paid propaganda for their major donors and because they're a non-profit it's less clear what's what than if they had paid advertisements

Idk what you're referring to but absolutely no human enterprise of any kind will be immune to corruption or ineptitude. It's 100% guaranteed to happen sometimes even in a communist Star Trek utopia. All we can ever do is remove or mitigate the incentives to serve purely selfish goals. Public media is substantially less corruptible than corporate media but there are no absolutes.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#305

Post by verdverm »

lapcat wrote: post #191
verdverm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not $44B that twitter will have available and can spend. Most (all?) will go to current investors to buy their stocks at a set price, which is where the $44B comes from It's probably more about how much the new owners will want to drop into it and how long before it moves to x.com (?) and becomes an everything app

> It's not $44B that twitter will have available and can spend. Most (all?) will go to current investors to buy their stocks at a set price, which is where the $44B comes from Why did you feel the need to mention this 100% obvious fact? Of course I meant that the new owners wouldn't shut down something they just spent $44 billion on, thereby throwing their investment in the trash, not that Twitter would magically get…

You called it an investment, it is not an investment, it is an acquisition.

It was not 100% obvious what you were implying, obviously

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#306

Post by ZWoz »

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?

Usenet is still here. Smaller, than used to be, but still here. Probably average English speaking person even don't understand, how big it is: there are healthy German speaking userbase, lot of people from Italy, even some Finnish groups have life in them.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#307

Post by [deleted] »

EarlKing wrote: post #253
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a…

"Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain obscene conduct. I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.

[deleted]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#308

Post by twobitshifter »

petesergeant wrote: post #198
cmeacham98 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.

That’s true of Facebook, but I can see Twitter receiving a fatal blow if the Musk acquisition goes through.

Rumors are that he plans to WeChatify twitter under X.com, so there’s more of a chance that twitter gets put under something larger and becomes neighbors with Square.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#309

Post by pessimizer »

EarlKing wrote: post #253
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a…

"Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain obscene conduct. I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.

> "Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain obscene conduct.

You've said this, but didn't bother to give a reason. Can't you go to church even when the plurality of people tolerate porn?

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