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Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

martinfowler.com

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Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#71

Post by kenjackson »

mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

No one wants to do this. The HN type crowd always is willing (or says its willing) to do more work to get more privacy/freedom/etc... Almost everyone else will take convenience and cost over those things.

That said, I have no interest in using Twitter now. But I want something that is basically Twitter, except without Elon Musk running it.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#72

Post by riffic »

phailhaus wrote: post #67
riffic wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

federation works just like email. I don't want just anyone to have a whitehouse.gov address (do you?)

Then what's the point of the closing line "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com "?

find me at gmail.com

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#73

Post by gfaster »

MBCook wrote: post #33
sdiacom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the suggestion is for Mastodon to replace internal communication, but to use it as a social media outlet for your organization.

Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim. But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not. Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake. It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the g…

Mastodon does have a feature where you can verify you own a website by putting a hidden tag on it that links to your profile.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#74

Post by Finnucane »

nimbius wrote: post #26
mensetmanusman wrote: post #6

Not trivial. Slack/teams are built to handle confidential communications with legal oversight.

the article is from 2022 but it may as well be from 2012. Back about a decade ago there was a huge push in companies toward "employee engagement" and social media was seen as the next big thing. about a bakers dozen companies (trello, atlassian, the usual scumbags) showed up to pitch their version of a sterile, enforced, monitored and legally blessed version of "twitter" for the office. GenZ ignored it, GenX abhorred…

But those things aren't generally for communicating with the outside world, whereas a federated server could network with the wider fediverse.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#75

Post by kurisufag »

vsareto wrote: post #22

Fair warning about this Mastodon behavior that can lead to embarrassment/leaks as new people start to use it: https://mastodon.social/@mmasnick/109299348553543784

this isn't a unique problem for the Fediverse.

sometime in ~2018, Mastodon (IIRC -- it might have been a specific instance) implemented inter-user messaging over ActivityPub, showing users only messages addressed to them -- since it wasn't actually part of the spec, the rest of the Fediverse saw them as regular feed messages.

Mastodon users assumed DMs were private and got burned, other instance operators were all of a sudden flooded with non-post messages, and everything was generally pretty suck-y until everyone got their shit together.

this sort of thing happens periodically (see: Gab's federation flooding the network in a similar way), it's a consequence of different entities trying to develop individual features over a unifying protocol.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#76

Post by anderspitman »

dmonitor wrote: post #50
anderspitman wrote: post #34

Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone. In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new se…

Is Tailscale not good enough for a simple tunneling service?

Tailscale is awesome. One of my two favorite companies alongside fly.io. But these are tools built for sysadmins and developers. Selfhosting needs tools built for the masses.

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#77

Post by dimitrios1 »

mberning wrote: post #61
CJefferson wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.

You weren't worried about it going bankrupt when it was losing millions of dollars a day and running in the red for years on end?

Once again, self proclaimed rational thinkers and scientific and engineering minds can't see their glaring biases. As long as my team is winning all of the problems "aren't so bad", but as soon as it's the other team, everything is a firebrand. Metas preparing to have massive layoffs and yet here we are arguing over someone making obvious and I mean obvious business decisions to cut waste, bloat, and start turning some profitability. We've lamented some of these financial woes about Twitter here for years, and now someone finally has started walking the walk and all of a sudden the world is ending and its time to jump ship?

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#78

Post by unicornporn »

gpm wrote: post #51
sneak wrote: post #12

No organization wants to do this, unfortunately. Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money, made more expensive by the choice in the Mastodon design to not support virtual hosting on a per-domain basis. You have to run (and admin) a complete new instance of Mastodon for each domain you wish to support.

Hey look, a major organization doing this: https://social.network.europa.eu/about It would be really really nice if it was easier for small organizations. For big organizations they're already in the business of running their own websites and this isn't anything new.

Hey, another one! https://social.bund.de/explore

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#79

Post by guelo »

mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

Maybe the free speech activists who now run Twitter could charge Mastodon promoters with "tortious interference" for damaging Twitter

Re: Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

#80

Post by TeMPOraL »

CJefferson wrote: post #55
mberning wrote: post #30

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated b…

Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why. You are right, I, like many people, believe Elon is going to ruin Twitter, possibly bankrupting it. Therefore it is worth looking at alternatives. The ruining of Twitter makes alternatives more attractive.

> Yes seem to be writing sarcastically and I'm not sure why.

Because it's hard to write any other way when people are losing their minds over a storm in a teacup. Literally nothing meaningful has changed about Twitter in the last few months. This is an entirely self-induced panic, based on a couple cases of someone maliciously misinterpreting a tweet here and there and everyone else amplifying it, and fueled by irrational fear and hatred towards Musk. It would be funny to watch, if it were not saturating the media channels 24/7.

Twitter's future wasn't in any way more certain before, nor was the platform any more stable. Adding or removing random features, and screwing third parties over API T&C changes, were pretty much the trademark of Twitter already.

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