What do you think is the main issue with Mastodon not really getting mainstream adoption? Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it? Not enough marketing? Bad UX?
All of the above, plus little to no-one actually bothered to use it daily, with not enough users to even talk to and compared to Twitter, Mastodon has an extremely limited network effect. This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.
Mastodon.technology Shutdown
481–490 of 604 posts
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in ter…
> There are plenty of other choices. There's even WordPress, with a plugin. A lot of ~~people~~ entities such as companies, organizations, etc have a WordPress site. edit: Pretend this site supports basic formatting in comments?
Hell, we even got one of our clients (we just provided hosting for some of their stuff) getting half-hacked while setting it up (they were not exactly the developer type). Half-hacked because we required app-to-internet traffic to be ran by proxy so the final payload didn't get downloaded on the server, hilariously enough.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would advise against soapbox actually. The developer got kicked off the Pleroma project after badgering other maintainers[1] (which he admits to doing) for reverting a technical decision he forced through after it was deemed to be not very useful to the project and encouraged bad practices (the fediverse uses a protocol called WebFinger to find other users, the developer wanted to add a bunch of alternate endpoints…
Can we stop villifying people we disagree with? I've seen it so much, I'm more inclined to believe it absolutely didn't happen that way.
https://blog.alexgleason.me/trans/
would trigger some people
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something. Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth" and so on, looking at you AWS).
Saying it as the person in charge of developing Mastodon, probably the most likely reason more servers don't charge for access is that it's not built into the software, so it would require either customizing the code or manually sending out invites based on external payments (e.g. Patreon, some servers actually do that). I would imagine the other likely reason is that complexity of signing up as a business with your…
For smaller instances, I really have a hard time seeing tax authorities going after people because they decided to host a server and ask a total of $100-$1000 per year from a few dozen people.
Lastly, perhaps if you weren't so biased against crypto, you'd realize that this is one actual valid use case for it?
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on your VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and simple servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a huge, slow and hairy beast. Even if you get the tech stack solved to an easily deployable package: The problem is you still need to invest immense amounts of time on moderation. Some of that responsibility is enforced legally (e.g. CSAM, warez,…
I run an instance and I really have none of these problems. Keeping open applications off solves a lot of them, you have to ask me for an invitation and I’m not going to give you one if I think you’re going to be a problem. There’s a Patreon for it that pays the server bills despite it only being a few hundred users. My users even say thanks for running the place now and then. Running a small node of The People’s Glo…
You're not building social network then. Just a single isolated place. So obviously problems of running bigger social space won't apply as much
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly I think some big issues are that not everyone has a fast machine thats going to be up all the time to host the instance. It would be cool to implement something like BitTorrent but for websites.
Isn't that what IPFS aims to be? https://ipfs.io/
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#487Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something. Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth" and so on, looking at you AWS).
$1500/mo does not even begin to cover a single 24/7 oncall devops person’s rate.
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#489This 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…
A major problem in distributed systems is names. one solution is to do what dns did, you can have nice names but you only get to pick them under the part of the hierarchy you control. another solution is to do what git or ipfs does. nobody gets useful names but at least you don't need any sort of central name database.
mastodon went the dns/email route, which makes sense people want nice names. but now your name is stuck on your domain. perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns.
Off tangent opinion on names in a federated system.
Unfortunately mastodon adopted the twitter style "@user" but because this only make sense in the context of a single domain mastodon mainly uses the awkward form "@user@domain" I think the email/xmpp form "user@domain" would have been better, but if they felt the @ prefix was critical to the experience of a twitter like micro blog than they probably should have adopted the form "@user.domain"
Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown
#490Does anyone have an idea about the infrastructure requirements and the cost of running an instance with the size of mastodon.technology?
I run an instance of some ~450 users, ~50 active, on a managed k8s cluster and it's costing me ~200usd/month. So I'm actually moving to my own DC where I get more than twice the resources for less than half the price. If you have DC and power sponsored you can get real far.