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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

561–570 of 604 posts

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither does any point on the Fediverse. As long as operators think they can run their site any way they want instead of obeying a common protocol then they're federated in name only. To put it another way: If I can never trust that my email will make it to someone on gmail due to the opaqueness of their spam filters, with no way to be whitelisted by a recipient, then email has been thoroughly decommoditized and cent…

Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a…

> Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation.

Wait, where have we heard this before? Oh right, Bitcoin and mining. It won’t be run by small time users if it catches traction. Not techies goofing around on the weekend, but when your Grandma creates an account because her friend is on there.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#562
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the question, it already supports comments. littr.me is basically a link aggregator and discussion platform that's very similar in UX to (old) reddit, hacker news and lobste.rs.

I wasn't expecting permalink to be the comment section. Very cool project! I'm always on the lookout for an altruistic reddit contender.

Granted, it wasn't the best name.

I changed it to "discussion" based on your feedback: https://todo.sr.ht/~mariusor/go-activitypub/261

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#563
post #371
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance. you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work > - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator. There is no "private data" on mastodon, I think it gets communicated enough that admins will have access to direct massages. it even says to you "Posts on Mast…

> you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work Maybe 2 minutes for the technical side, then 2 months of getting all your old followers to follow you at your new address. > if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;) Or use a different protocol...

> getting all your old followers to follow you at your new address

No, the old instance will redirect your followers, without interaction. (Though the old instance has to be up to publish the migration.)

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realise that you're the one being personally dramatic here, right? Especially with a comment like that.

It's interesting how some people always assume it's a moral failing when others refuse to engage with their bullshit.

GP clearly and convincingly explained how there was nothing personal about their comments. You, OTOH, bring in your mechanic and his wife... And then get fucking hostile in response to a calmly reasoned explanation.

So no, it's definitely you who are bringing the personal drama here. To the extent that one can't help wondering, mr Random-string-of-letters-and-numbers, whether you are that hostile solo developer.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#565

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That simply isn't true. I'm a nobody and plenty of folk have found me from seemingly inane posts. People have found me out of the blue, from across the Fediverse, and I have no idea why; all I do know is we now chat frequently and without either of us even looking for one another. What's impossible is to discover how to use a platform without reading the documentation, and assuming that algorithms will just do the wo…

If you use a popular instances your account will show up in searches, likes and other things. But when using an independent server, one would need to type your full username, and then try and see if such an account exists. if you only type the display name, or username without the server address, nothing will show up. Which is fine for chat apps like Matrix or E-Mail, but not for platforms where discoverability is im…

You know what else helps a lot? Getting in quality conversations with others, having something relevant to share with others, etc. IOW, by being social.

At this point, it seems like a feature that the system does not make it easy to be discovered.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#566

This is predictable. A Mastodon instance, last I checked, involved installing a constellation of a half-dozen databases and services. That's insane. It should be a single binary.

PostgreSQL and Redis are a constellation of half-dozen databases?

Sorry, I wasn't precise: it's two databases (Postgres, Redis), an HTTP frontend (nginx) and specific versions of two interpreted language runtimes (Ruby, Node). The point stands.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I vaguely remember Ello being mentioned as the place to go that wasn't Google+, and I see that they have now pivoted to being an artist social network. kind of interesting.

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#568
post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All in all, it doesn't mean much. Mastodon makes the domain part of your ID, so moving to another server isn't different than, say, moving to Twitter. Even if it's possible to move your existing content, it doesn't have significant value on an ephemeral timeline. You might as well save your backups and keep going. Mastodon might be able to force your followers to follow your new account, but AFAIK it doesn't do that…

Mastodon does inform your followers when your account moves[0], but unfortunately doesn't allow you to automatically migrate your existing posts over to your new account.[1] [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8003 [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

That's not much different than informing your followers with your new Twitter profile link, is it?

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I vaguely remember Ello being mentioned as the place to go that wasn't Google+, and I see that they have now pivoted to being an artist social network. kind of interesting.

Ello's had an interesting ride.

It began as a venture by a couple of graphic artists, focused on artists. It happened to have (for a few iterations) a quite clean design based on Markdown, and (with a couple of what should have been reasonably small tweaks) could have done well in the long-form text+images space (now largely owned / failed by old-school blogging engines such as Wordpress, Medium, and Substack).

The features it had, including Markdown's sections and tables was why I'd posted that particular take on G+ there. It simply presented the information better than any other readily-available platform I was using at the time.

In 2015 a bunch of trans activists and sex performers who'd been hounded off Facebook by its Real Names policy wound up on Ello, and a few people arrived from other platforms (I was at the time a refugee from G+). For about six to twelve months it was the New Hawtness, and attempted a few pivots to the space, but performed fairly poorly in doing so. My own Ello profile has a link to a set of curated posts, one section of which details various gripes and failings.

One thing Ello did do was organise as a B-Corp with a community focus. That went swimmingly until it didn't, with the first accepting VC money then being sold to a collector of such sites. The B-Corp language seems to have disappeared, along with the community principles texts. What's left is now ... a sort of vaguely art-aggregation site with an interesting history but little future so far as I can tell. It's burned virtually all its early adoptors (myself included).

Re: Mastodon.technology Shutdown

#570
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and there will be people that will just throw their porn collection there, hogging space on other people's drives for no good reason. There is an option of dividing it between "publisher" (source) and "cachers" (caching whatever is recent and popular) but that only helps a little bit. > Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are…

edit: Scratch that, a more fleshed out and popular protocol that implements this P2P concept is Scuttlebutt: www. http://scuttlebutt.nz/ The most user friendly and refined client I’ve found that implements this protocol is Planetary: https://www.planetary.social/

Your comment piqued my interest, but I didn't find the android (Manyverse) or desktop (Patchwork) apps to be user friendly. The UIs had a few UX oddities and unless you are convinced to join by others who are already using it, the social network is barren. Even trying to chain my from the most active people (last posts months ago) through their follower and following lists didn't fix my impression of it being a historical ledger.
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