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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#431

Post by rakoo »

mariusor wrote: post #359
rakoo wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly what we need. The current landscape of Fediverse is too young: every application involves both functionality, identity and community. So you don't really join a network, but you join a specific community using a specific medium. You can't join multiple communities (ie follow multiple instances): you have to create multiple accounts, you can't follow a full instance but only individual instances. You c…

I feel like matrix solves a different problem, I believe that ActivityPub and Matrix can coexist. Honestly the very late game plan for the projects I'm working on is to be able gather under a single umbrella a suite of opensource applications to create a meta social network pod that can be easily launched in a similar way to Google apps on a custom domain (ActivityPub and Matrix for a starters). I think there could b…

Contrary to the way matrix is developed and sold today, the protocol allows for way way more than chat.

There is talk at the moment about adding federation to got forges: let instances talk together, accounts cross post, etc. It's centered around instances and they have specific addons to interact. Matrix can make it work because it takes a radically orthogonal approach: rooms are front and center. Rooms can be joined by anyone anywhere. Rooms are replicated. The homeserver is a technical detail in service of the functional source of truth: the Room, an append-only log of arbitrary json. There is also a key-value store for arbitrary blobs to store binary stuff.

In the context of forges, a repo can be a room: events for issues/replies, events for merge requests, events for CI/CD blobs for actual code storage and releases, ... Anyone can join and push events, with the correct rights of course, so you have branches included. Everything is replicated. No one cares what instance you are from.

I seriously invite you to consider the semantically model of Matrix, it's pretty good.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#432

Post by ElevenLathe »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #44
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…

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.

These services may not "shut down" but they might change (or have already changed) so much that many would not have signed up knowing what they know now. This is kind of a danger of an open protocol too (for example, IRC users who signed up in 1998 to talk about Britney Spears gossip are probably not well-served by most current IRC networks), but not to the same extent.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#433

Post by akkartik »

pohl wrote: post #245
makapuf wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood this as soon enough after they close.

...which is certainly before the heat death of the universe.

That's an extremely loose bound. 60 years would have the same error bars.

https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will...

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#434

Post by alexvoda »

ihuman wrote: post #418
nightpool wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. The process has three steps: First, you update the receiving profile to "allow" the move by pointing at each other using the as:alsoKnownAs relationship. This allows everybody to confirm that the receiving account is participating in the move, and authorizes it. Then, you update your old account with the "movedTo" property, so that any new users who look up your account will see a notification that you've moved.…

If it doesn't update the old content on your old account, then is there a way to copy the old content to your new account?

I imagine that is what ggg-parent meant by: "it does involve down- and uploading and/or copypasting zips/datafiles."

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#435

Post by dredmorbius »

andsoitis wrote: post #411
qznc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...

Didn’t G+ shut down primarily because nobody was using it (failed to compete against other options)?

Google's stated reason for shutting down Google+ was on account of security issues.

That said, Google's stated communications regarding Google+ had and have been questionable from the start. I'd had my own part in this in addressing the true size of the active community on the site, which was far below the 3--4 billion listed profiles and many hundreds of millions of active users touted. In practice, probably closer to 4--6 million true frequently actives within 30 days or so (itself not unsubstantial), and perhaps 100 million who'd been active at some point.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq>

But I'd take that stated reason with a large dose of salt.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#436

Post by thrown_22 »

paganel wrote: post #396
pessimizer wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that Reddit is very respectable, we're supposed to pretend that it wasn't started as normie 4chan, even ripping off naming subsections like naked directories, just like every imageboard. A normie 4chan that got lucky by existing when digg decided to commit suicide.

Not sure about the intentions of the reddit founders, to be honest, but at the beginning there were no subsections and the like. When they did show up they were implemented as sub-domains, for example http://programming.reddit.com . I can't exactly remember how much that lasted, but it was for more than a couple of months (I'd say for at least half a year) before the directory-thing was implemented.

[flagged]

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#437

Post by dredmorbius »

rco8786 wrote: post #182
qznc wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...

> Google+ as an example It's probably a better example of a service that never got off the ground. Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their current cash positions alone.

I suspect otherwise.

One of the challenges of a social network, especially in a declining phase, is that there is far less commercial value being generated at the same time that various sorts of costs, including attacks on the network in both technical and social/economic senses increase. High-value members abandon the network, and those who remain are either stuck (say, because of institutional circumstances elsewhere), or are actively seeking to exploit other members.

This means that Trust & Safety costs are constantly increasing at the same time that recruiting talent to serve that role becomes increasingly difficult.

What the true cost curve looks like isn't clear, but basing your statement on a constant cost based on present experience is ... probably flawed.

This is especially true at Facebook's scale.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#438

Post by dredmorbius »

giantrobot wrote: post #346
ByThyGrace wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TIL about .compact on reddit threads. Thanks!

Wait until you learn about .json and .rss on Reddit threads! IIRC they used to work for subreddits as well but I have not tested either in...forever.

A few of the Reddit RSS features I've found / documented:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_...>

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#439

Post by mattdesl »

smoldesu wrote: post #403
klabb3 wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 archi…

If this is a concern of yours, don't migrate your account. All instance admins play the role of Twitter CEO on Mastodon, which means (much like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, et. al) they can access all data you've trusted them with. The point of Mastodon is that it broke down these data silos, and give people more sane ownership models for social media. Your privacy concern is valid, but Mastod…

You might be misunderstanding E2EE. In double ratchet system, not even the operator or host can decrypt DMs.

Fully homomorphic encryption is also possible to operate _on encrypted data_ albeit computationally impractical still for a couple years.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#440

Post by [deleted] »

mattdesl wrote: post #439
smoldesu wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this is a concern of yours, don't migrate your account. All instance admins play the role of Twitter CEO on Mastodon, which means (much like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, et. al) they can access all data you've trusted them with. The point of Mastodon is that it broke down these data silos, and give people more sane ownership models for social media. Your privacy concern is valid, but Mastod…

You might be misunderstanding E2EE. In double ratchet system, not even the operator or host can decrypt DMs. Fully homomorphic encryption is also possible to operate _on encrypted data_ albeit computationally impractical still for a couple years.

[deleted]
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