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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#461

Post by teawrecks »

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.…

> 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.

And you're free to pick a mastodon instance that offers the same (if that's something you cared to do). Do you also complain that it's possible for any rando can spin up their own email server and start passing out free email addresses?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#462

Post by galaxyLogic »

vidarh wrote: post #261
galaxyLogic wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maintaining anything takes effort, so who's gonna do it for free?

Maybe there could be a variant of NNTP which allowed some amount of advertisement posts in between. Then let the maintainers keep the proceeds from those?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#463

Post by klabb3 »

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…

> End-to-end encryption doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data.

It's literally the opposite. E2EE means only the participating parties can decrypt the messages.

> In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account.

TLS is not designed for e2ee, it's designed to protect traffic in the client server model. This is referred to as in-transit encryption. SSL got traction mostly due to e-commerce.

> I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here.

Prior to computers, people pre-shared their symmetric secret keys only with those they trusted, precisely to make their messages secure from spies, couriers etc. This is e2ee.

You are right that "you have to trust our almighty server" is commonplace, but they absolutely do not have to. In 1991 came PGP which let you have e2ee over email (even if your peer is offline). Signal, Matrix etc use more advanced protocols to provide even more security and useful features. Even whatsapp and telegram have e2ee in most ways, although they have been criticized for not satisfying all criteria.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#464

Post by HellsMaddy »

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…

Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? This has always confused me and is part of the reason I haven't started using it, I couldn't decide on which instance to use. Why can't an account be globally unique and not tied to a specific instance? Why, as a user, do I have to deal with the low-level concept of an instance?

Is this all just a consequence of keeping user data private-ish? I understand the data has to be stored somewhere, and if user data were distributed to the entire network, it obviously wouldn't be private. Couldn't e2e + public key encryption be used to work around this somehow?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#465

Post by kQq9oHeAz6wLLS »

jefftk wrote: post #168
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...

> Let’s use Google+ as an example. Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and have been at or near the top of their categories for over a decade. Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.

But still plenty popular - at it's peak it had 200 million users. For comparison, that's nearly 2/3 the population of the USA

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#466

Post by romeros »

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.

Orkut was super successful and was eventually shutdown.. Meta will live on forever but facebook might well be a relic of the past. Most people don't even log into facebook anymore than a few times a year.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#467

Post by madeofpalk »

qznc wrote: post #63
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.

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...

Twitter and Facebook has users.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#468

Post by formerkrogemp »

Chris2048 wrote: post #217
burntwater wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How will your argument hold up when f c book finishes dying? We'll find out soon enough. Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.

"soon enough" could be a decade relative to the assumption that they'll be around forever.

There are a couple of supreme court cases that could dramatically impact the internet as we know given the current composition of the court..

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#469

Post by kaetemi »

efdee wrote: post #145
importgravity wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The staffers setup the new servers and did all the heavy-lifting. As a user, I only had to point my client from Freenode to Libera (exactly one line change in my client config), run /msg nickserv register to register myself, run /msg chanserv register to register the channels I op-ed, and it was all done. Total time spent was less than 30 minutes. The next few days, others did the same and the community started trick…

And yet userbase got decimated for most channels when moving from Freenode to Libera. Just because it was only 30 minutes (for you or for anyone) doesn't mean people will go through the effort.

We switched to a bridged Libera IRC, FreeGameDev IRC, and a Discord channel, when the freenode drama happened, and our total lurker count went 10x.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#470

Post by xani_ »

danuker wrote: post #446
matthewdgreen wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey even gopher has 333 unique servers according to a recent census. But for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead.

> for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead. It has a very small community. That is very different from being dead - in fact, that community is probably much more passionate about what makes it specific than a large community. For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.

> For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.

I'd say ratio of sysadmins to actual users of the service is good indication that something is dead

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