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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

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Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#531

Post by kevincox »

HellsMaddy wrote: post #464
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…

From a technical point of view because ActivityPub is based in HTTP and other instances need to know what endpoint to talk to.

There is already support for basic migration of followers but it would be nice to see fully instance-independant accounts. Probably something based on cryptography so your account is a key and you can publish from any server. However a protocol like this would be a lot more complicated than ActivityPub.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#532

Post by Aeolun »

KirillPanov wrote: post #493
somat wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then becomes why can't you change your name? and it has mainly to do with avoiding name conflicts in administratively isolated systems. 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…

> because that is your identity That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.

> That seems like a very, very poor choice.

By all means, enlighten us to the better one. It seems like they made a tradeoff here, and one that’s most in line with keeping everything distributed.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#533

Post by yellow_lead »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #172
yellow_lead wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, where do you expect your data to be stored? In the ether?

On a server that I personally own or rent. Why does my data need to be anywhere else?

Well, don't use someone else's instance then. Boom, solved.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#534

Post by vidarh »

johnchristopher wrote: post #518
vidarh wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does show boost/favourite counts once you open a toot, and just like on Twitter you can also click to see the list of people who have boosted/favourited The other parts are true, but the "manipulation of timelines" is just a question of time because it's useful if you follow lots of people. As long as it remains opt-in and a setting it's a good thing . I'm planning an ActivityPub implementation for myself and "man…

I also believe character limits is a problem and that it ultimately leads to polarization.

That too is easily modified. Mastodon hardcodes the value a few places, or at least used to. Pleroma has config settings to separately enforce a local limit on how much you're allowed to write, and a hard limit above which it will drop remote posts. Problem is the latter - any instances which increases the post length too much will need to consider that they'll effectively make federation unreliable for their users because most other instances will have a hard limit above which they'll drop or truncate posts.

But overall it's easy to iterate on this, and you can try things on your own instance or your own "corner" of likeminded instances while still be able to interoperate on most things.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#535

Post by vidarh »

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…

The biggest thing is that expectations are different. Mastodon doesn't do much (or rather ActivityPub doesn't do much - there are many ActivityPub implementations), though there's at least a less manual way of handling federation than having to e-mail people and get added to their config by hand.

With USENET people expected to see every posts in the newsgroups they were subscribed to, and a lot of people would complain loudly if anything was missing. With a network like this nobody expects to read everything. At the same time receiving everything is easier (still) - if you federate with a couple major endpoints you get most stuff. There will be challenges with this as the network grows but I spent too much time ensuring we got messages from newsgroup X within Y hours (less was unfeasible, as there were still sites exchanging on a schedule via dialup).

With respect to spam, once you accept you're not likely to see everything, things get a lot simpler and you can apply a lot more aggressive filtering.

Personally I'm working on my own ActivityPub implementation, and one of the things I've used on Twitter in the past very effectively via the Twitter API was a simple Bayesian network used to rank things to surface interesting stuff, but lots of room to apply more sophisticated machine learning there too.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#536

Post by vidarh »

galaxyLogic wrote: post #462
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.

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?

For NNTP there's a whole (small) industry around providing paid subscriptions.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#537

Post by vidarh »

berkes wrote: post #380
riffic wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I know this exists. As does NextCloud. But what solution or use-case does it serve? I honestly cannot see it. Neither for WP nor for NC. ActivityPub is -aside from a protocol- something that is designed for social networking mostly. How does "adding a WP plugin" help? Why would I want to connect my blog or website to this fediverse? Is it just so people can get my blogposts in their timeline? Because that's the only…

I don't know how Wordpress or NextCloud uses it, but for my own use I'm considering building a comment system for my sites around in, on the basis that having comments about my posts exposed to the fediverse seems like a good way of increasing reach.

(there's the challenge of length; there's no problem upping the post-length for comments etc., but many instances will reject them, so you do face the issue of having to replace the body of longer comments with a link to a page, which is sub-optimal but doable)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#538

Post by johnchristopher »

vidarh wrote: post #534
johnchristopher wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also believe character limits is a problem and that it ultimately leads to polarization.

That too is easily modified. Mastodon hardcodes the value a few places, or at least used to. Pleroma has config settings to separately enforce a local limit on how much you're allowed to write, and a hard limit above which it will drop remote posts. Problem is the latter - any instances which increases the post length too much will need to consider that they'll effectively make federation unreliable for their users b…

Thanks.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#539

Post by CRConrad »

freedomben wrote: post #264
philippejara wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why are you censoring facebook?

I was wondering that too, and I think my brain may have figured it out. on a quick glance at the way it's written, my brain read "fuckbook" rather than "facebook" since f*c*book aligns with both. If that's right, it's kind of silly IMHO

Both funny and fitting, which makes it a net plus IMO.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#540

Post by deroanth »

Aeolun wrote: post #532
KirillPanov wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> because that is your identity That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.

> That seems like a very, very poor choice. By all means, enlighten us to the better one. It seems like they made a tradeoff here, and one that’s most in line with keeping everything distributed.

I don't know that I'd agree that it's a "very, very poor choice" but I can see how it would prevent Mastodon from seeing more widespread adoption. If widespread adoption isn't their goal, then it really doesn't matter though, and as you said, they made a tradeoff. I can definitely see the benefits of both ways of handling users.
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