Mastodon.technology Shutdown • Hacker News Board

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#501

Post by dbmnt » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:18 AM UTC

yamrzou wrote: post #310

Does anyone have an idea about the infrastructure requirements and the cost of running an instance with the size of mastodon.technology?

The pricing on masto.host should give you some idea of the requirements and cost:

https://masto.host/pricing/

I think they're the largest managed hosting provider in this space. Obviously they are charging a premium compared to deploying it all yourself, but I think the prices are fair, and the plans give you a pretty good idea of the resources required.

No offense to the other admin, but $200/mo for 50 active users is way too high. A Kubernetes cluster for 50 users is obvious overkill IMO. Maybe you did it that way for the learning aspect, which is fine. You should be able to host 50 active users for a 10th of that cost though. You can easily do it on a single VPS.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#502

Post by dbmnt » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:21 AM UTC

xani_ wrote: post #490

INTPenis wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's ridiculously expensive for that tiny amount of users

You could easily host 50 active users on a single VPS for a 10th of that cost. masto.host has a plan that covers 100 active users for $19/mo.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#503

Post by jlkuester7 » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:23 AM UTC

vgel wrote: post #415

vidarh wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What has Mastodon improved on this process, though? It seems the same issues are in place -- difficult to administer technically (this post) and hard to deal with spam (have heard before, don't have a link on hand unfortunately). This is a genuine question -- I wasn't around for USENET so maybe this is a "quantity of difference becomes quality of difference" issue where the degree of effort for maintaining it was jus…

I deployed and have been maintaining a very small Mastodon server (~10 active users) for several years now and I can say that at my scale it is not difficult (for someone with modest technical abilities but no professional sysadmin experience). Sure if your instance is as large as Mastodon.technology and you are the only admin doing it as a hobby/side-gig then things can get rough.

Regarding spam, there is some (seemingly inevitable in any community involving humans). But frankly Mastodon, right from the beginning, focused heavily on Moderation tools. Figuratively speaking, no expense has been spared to make it easy and convenient to block bad actors (or instances) from your account (or your whole instance).

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#504

Post by ReactiveJelly » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:43 AM UTC

Kamq wrote: post #492

HellsMaddy wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? There's no central server, and not all of the instances talk to each other. Where... where would you put the account data?

There's a way to do this, but it requires fat clients https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#505

Post by stjohnswarts » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:46 AM UTC

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…

I always wondered when twitter is ultimately shuttered if they will hand off (at least all the public facing) tweet to some place like the the library of congress for historical purposes.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#506

Post by krmboya » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:47 AM UTC

xani_ wrote: post #470

danuker wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Aren't the sysadmins actual users?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#507

Post by jlkuester7 » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 3:50 AM UTC

xani_ wrote: post #470

danuker wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I get that this was said in jest and I laughed.

But I do think it is worth pointing out there is nothing wrong with folks doing something to scratch their own itch. It does not have to be hugely popular or have a ton of users. If the sysadmins care enough to keep it running, that it literally all that matters...

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#508

Post by HellsMaddy » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 4:47 AM UTC

dezren39 wrote: post #499

Kamq wrote: post #492

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? There's no central server, and not all of the instances talk to each other. Where... where would you put the account data?

Ya'll are describing SSB protocol and ManyVerse.

I just looked into SSB and I really like the concept. It seems much more elegant than Mastodon. Why is Mastodon/the Fediverse so much more popular (or is it?)? What are the advantages of federation over total decentralization? I suppose one disadvantage of total decentralization is the need for ‘fat clients’, as another commenter pointed out.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#509

Post by kixiQu » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 5:31 AM UTC

corobo wrote: post #313

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 you copy your toots across yet? Last I heard you can only migrate profile which seems a bit.. well I can do that by hand in 10 minutes E: called them tweets

To be clear, when you move accounts, your old server will notify the servers of all the people who follow you such that they will silently be updated to following your new account. This is not something you can do yourself at all; you can contact all of those people and tell them about your new account, but then they'd have to take action to follow it.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#510

Post by kixiQu » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 5:33 AM UTC

wan_ala wrote: post #430

anderspitman wrote: post #256

Thanks for your hard work Ash, and sorry to hear about your loved one. As much as I love the Fediverse, I think the culture leans toward instances that are too big. I think the number of people on each instance should be much closer to 1 than 1000. The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure th…

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.

hypercore :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_(web_browser) https://github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-browser/