[HN Gopher] Mastodon: Servers, Good and Bad
___________________________________________________________________
Mastodon: Servers, Good and Bad
Author : ingve
Score : 73 points
Date : 2022-11-27 18:06 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nedbatchelder.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (nedbatchelder.com)
| retox wrote:
| Maybe it's a feature only of the soapbox frontend the instance
| I'm on uses but I can add a remote instance timeline and it's
| exactly the same as being a user there. The "which instance to
| choose" problem has already been solved.
|
| Another feature is that you can migrate your profile and follows
| to another instance very easily, your followers get a message to
| say you've moved and they are already set to follow you.
| cbeach wrote:
| Author describes Elon Musk as "a deranged over-leveraged
| misanthropic moron"
|
| I stopped reading there.
|
| Too much silly, hateful hyperbole about Elon Musk at the moment.
| Yes, I get it - he's seen as a Republican, and you're a Democrat
| supporter. You don't like the fact Twitter used to be owned by
| the Blue tribe and now it's owned by a member of the Red tribe.
|
| But for goodness sake, just give it a rest. If you don't like
| Musk, just don't use Twitter. There's no need to broadcast this.
| nedbat wrote:
| My complaint with Musk is that he's running the company in a
| chaotic and destructive way. It's true, I don't agree with his
| politics, but that's not the problem here. He's got $1B/year of
| interest to pay, but has lost half of his advertisers. He's
| gutted the moderation teams, and says he will reinstate all of
| the banned accounts. He's capriciously laid off much of the
| staff. It's hard to see how Twitter will continue to survive.
| stonogo wrote:
| All the insults the author wrote, and you still needed to make
| something up to get angry about? It's entirely possible to
| dislike someone regardless of their politics. Lots of people do
| it every day.
| addajones wrote:
| I felt the same reading the article. So much hate towards a
| single human. There are many ways to express dislike or
| disagreement with someone or their ideas and management styles
| without being so explicit and rude about it. It seems like its
| a badge of honor and prerequisite to say "I hate Elon, ok
| moving on about Mastodon..." I believe it's possible to dislike
| someones views and still have common ground and dialog, but I
| guess I'm in the minority (online) now.
| emkoemko wrote:
| because he told everyone that Tesla cars would be robotaxis
| that make you $30,000 a year and you would be dumb not to buy
| a Tesla...i know a few people who fell for this scam. I stay
| away from anything he is involved in after this. There are
| lots of reasons for people hating him and for good reasons.
| cbeach wrote:
| So he's slow on delivering a very difficult and ground
| breaking technology (he has, however, delivered FSD to
| North America).
|
| Is that really a reason to hate the man? "Hate" is a strong
| and emotionally loaded word.
| nedbat wrote:
| This is nothing personal against Musk. When you look at
| what he has done since taking over Twitter, it's nothing
| but chaos. He doesn't seem to have a clue how to run that
| company. I have liked Twitter, and I hate what he is
| doing to it.
| cbeach wrote:
| As someone who likely has opposing political views to
| yours I think the following outcomes were vital to a
| well-functioning public square for inclusive and civil
| discourse:
|
| * taking the company private, and off the stock market,
| so decisions are no longer made with short term valuation
| / stock price movements in mind
|
| * sacking the vast majority of bureaucratic staff, who
| have shown themselves to be politically biased.
| Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story would NEVER
| have happened on an impartial social network
|
| * trying out new ideas. Twitter was haemorrhaging money
| and was technically stuck in a rut
|
| * sacking the board and C-suite (for the gross failures
| described above)
|
| A lot of people will have their noses put out of joint by
| Musk's moves so far. But there are tens, possibly
| hundreds, of millions of ordinary people out there who
| will feel they can trust the network again, since Musk's
| changes. These people are not extremists, or racists, or
| bigots - they are just people who have right-of-centre
| views and who value fairness and freedom of expression.
| nedbat wrote:
| How do you feel about taking on a billion dollars of
| interest per year? Then fumbling new features to lose
| half the advertisers? What do you think of asking
| software engineers to bring screenshots of lines of code?
| It makes no sense.
| r-w wrote:
| Projection. It has nothing to do with his politics, and
| everything to do with his corrosive and toxic style of
| management, communication, and planning.
| globalreset wrote:
| Then go work somewhere else.
|
| It's BS. It's entirely about political and ideological hate.
| Who do you think are you going to fool? Amazon poorly
| treeting warehouse workers and swe alikes didn't create
| nearly fraction as much hate and no one cried when Bezos was
| buying WaPo.
|
| Worst case Musk will run Twitter to the ground and people
| there will find work elsewhere. So why all the hate?
| ruminator1 wrote:
| No billionaire gets more hate than Jeff bezoz and
| Washington Post is not comparable to twitter.
|
| Almost everyone uses twitter, it getting bought is news
| enough but elon also hilariously mismanaged it during the
| first week.
|
| The hate is deserved and has nothing to do with his
| politics.
| aliqot wrote:
| > No billionaire gets more hate than Jeff bezoz
|
| Elon by a mile. I can't go an hour without seeing his
| smirk on some headline. I haven't seen or heard about
| Jeff Bezos but maybe once this month, and every month
| before that.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Because Bezos wasn't even remotely as attention seeking as
| Musk is.
|
| You're asking why someone seeking attention got attention.
| Which.. shouldn't really be surprising, should it?
| wwweston wrote:
| Amazon gets a _ton_ of criticism for how it treats
| warehouse, delivery, and tech employees, as well as how it
| mixes inventory and treats 3rd party vendors. You can 't
| hardly have a thread here on HN without all these topics
| coming up.
|
| > no one cried when Bezos was buying WaPo. Bezos was buying
| WaPo.
|
| Most people couldn't tell you what's changed about the
| WaPo, many probably don't even know Bezos is the owner.
| There's certainly been nothing like the public and obvious
| turmoil going on at Twitter.
|
| And in spite of that, here are plenty of people who
| expressed concern about Bezos's ownership not only at time
| of purchase but on an ongoing basis.
| Maxburn wrote:
| Well said. I've been on mastodon for about three years now and
| there a sudden influx of people griping about Twitter on
| mastodon and it's super annoying.
|
| I'm also finding out that my preferred home server is blocked
| by a lot of others as I discover and try to follow people I've
| known on Twitter that just joined mastodon. Fortunately I've
| got an alt on a server about nobody blocks so new users
| considering joining somewhere should consider that.
| Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be many good tools for
| finding that out.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| DistroTube (A tech youtuber) pointed out this would probably
| happen - Mastodon servers seem to be a more polite place, and
| legions of upset twitter uses would just not fit into that
| culture.
|
| On the flipside, I was last on twitter in 2020. Joined again
| recently out of curiosity, and it's a much more pleasant
| site. (Not attributing this to Musk, as I was not on twitter
| immediately before him). No longer has clickbait partisan
| news articles all over the front page, and it seems much
| easier to just follow chill people you find amusing rather
| than tempting you with cortisol spiking arguments all the
| time. YMMV.
| [deleted]
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Counteranecdata: a nontrivial number of people I talk to
| have been leaving Twitter because their feeds are suddenly
| filled with MAGA ragebait and coded bigotry, which is the
| absolute straw for them.
|
| 2020 was the height of Trumpism, so it's possible that it
| really is calmer even so, or it might be more calm for new
| accounts for some reason? I'm certainly not planning to
| sharecrop on the Elmo plantation to find out personally.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Weird, when I look at my feed it's either people I
| follow, people they follow (some of whom I've decided to
| mute), and their replies to people I don't follow.
|
| Pretty easy to curate to me (if someone engages with too
| much "Ragebait", unfollow them), but I can't speak for
| everyones feed.
| toofy wrote:
| i'll echo the sibling comment that my twitter feed has
| gotten significantly more abusive and troll comments than
| before.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Do you know why it's blocked by a lot of others? Widely
| blocked servers are in that state for a reason. The reason
| might ultimately be "server admin is unable to do
| moderation," which adds to the moderation and potentially
| legal burden of the other server admins if they don't
| defederate that instance.
|
| MMasnick's moderation speedrun article, although targeted at
| emerald boy, applies equally (mostly) to every new Mastodon
| instance admin. Unless your instance is locked down to just
| you. Or you and a couple of close friends.
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-
| you...
| Maxburn wrote:
| Oh yes, I know why it's blocked. There is no moderation and
| a couple nasties interacting with people on other servers
| early on brought that down on us. It's mostly self policing
| and block lists these days. Generally a fun group but
| there's things that come up in the free speech area some
| people don't want to hear.
|
| No matter, I'm also on another server that's highly
| technical and federation seems to be working fine.
| the_third_wave wrote:
| Had this been the British parliament I would have said "hear,
| hear" but since it is not I can but vote this up and as that
| this polarisation better stop and be reversed soon if you U.S.
| of Americans want to remain one country, under whatever deity
| you prefer if one. The sheer hatred coming from the self-
| proclaimed "good" side towards the "red" side is as destructive
| as can be, the disdain for the "blue" side coming from the
| "red" is almost as - but not quite as - bad. Musk buying
| Twitter may be a step in the right direction if he manages to
| make the platform open for more than just "blue" narratives but
| he better not turn it into one for "red" narratives if he is to
| succeed.
| toofy wrote:
| if musk doesn't want attention then he should stop screaming
| "look at me! look at me!"
|
| it's illogical to constantly cry out for attention and then
| complain how unfair it is that he's getting attention.
| lonk wrote:
| Every mastodon server has its own Musk :P
| aliqot wrote:
| Who needs a social network? HN is almost too much. How much
| hubris is enough to say "people should hear my smallest thoughts
| and acknowledge them with appreciation or by repeating them".
| wwweston wrote:
| Find people with non-small thoughts, or at least positive-if-
| small-value small thoughts, same as any other avenue of
| connection with other human beings.
|
| Social networks are a tech/tool. Like most other tech/tools,
| they're more magnifiers of existing facts of the human
| condition than they are things that fundamentally change them.
|
| If what you dislike is the thoughts of other people,
| fortunately there have always been choices that can increase
| isolation.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| I don't "need" one, but i appreciate their ability for
| community. Ie i'm in the mood for a semi-niche Computer
| Graphics community. There's something about Microblogging that
| i find.. interesting. Something like a Forum, say Reddit or an
| actual Forum is so.. purposeful. Does my WIP post warrant an
| actual forum post? Likely not. Something about Microblogging
| seems more fit for WIP posts of artwork/etc, tech thoughts,
| etc. Likewise i enjoy subscribing to other peoples content in
| the same nature.
|
| The barrier for forums seems to be large enough that the posts
| that get submitted are often finished works only.. at least in
| my experience. To me that's less interesting.
| aliqot wrote:
| You need one, but the word 'need' is too strong. If that's
| the case what other word would you use?
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Not sure i follow. I said i didn't need one because, well,
| i don't believe i do. Good evidence of this is that i have
| not, and do not currently, have one. Nor have i ever used
| Twitter, Facebook or any social platform beyond link
| aggregators. And even with link aggregators i've rotated
| accounts and/or deleted history frequently as a way to
| undermine "identity", which to me is vital to social
| networks.
|
| With that said, lately i've been in the process for
| searching for one because of the reasons i stated above.
| I'm looking for a like-minded community on Art stuffs. A
| forum will do, but microblogging seems to be more inlined
| with my desired, as i described above.
|
| I guess to reword my previous post; "social networks" _can_
| have different applications in my view. In the case of
| microblogging, i like the idea more as a Forum flipped on
| it 's head to reduce friction on content posting.
| aliqot wrote:
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Not sure what that has to do with my use case. I'm not
| interested in what Joey from school did, you are correct.
| That's why i'm not on Facebook.
|
| If Joey started creating Art in the category i'm
| interested in then i would be. Because i'm interested in
| the content, specifically. Mastodon feels a good platform
| to push and pull said content, when compared to Forums at
| least.
|
| You seem to be arguing something entirely outside of what
| i'm describing. As if my use case is somehow a misguided
| drug addiction that _i don 't even have yet_. Remember,
| i've not and never have been on FB/Twitter. How can you
| equate me to a cigarette smoker when i don't yet smoke?
| aliqot wrote:
| We're probably not going to agree, and I trust you
| understand your own needs and wants better than I do.
| Have a good weekend, I apologize for mischaracterizing
| you with a generalization.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Oh no worries, though i'm happy to better understand your
| thoughts on this subject. I don't think you generalized
| me either, we're still exchanging information/facts in
| this discussion. Apologies if i came off harsh.
|
| I just think it's safe to say that i'm definitely not
| addicted to traditional social media.. by the fact that
| i'm not on any of them. I'd be willing to accept the
| argument that i am addicted to HN, though i do think i
| take reasonable steps to mitigate that.
|
| BUT, i'm not sure if you'd classify HN as Social Media in
| the same way that FB/Twitter is.
| dash2 wrote:
| All of this is what I expected: Mastodon is a great big set of
| public goods problem waiting to happen, and it will take over
| from Twitter on the Year of Linux on the Desktop.
|
| Public goods problems include:
|
| * Who makes it easy to onboard people?
|
| * Who is responsible for Mastodon not having a reputation - based
| on some servers, not all but some is enough - as a sink of
| depravity?
|
| * What happens if, say, anti-Rohingya activists decide to use
| Mastodon to spread propaganda and plan violence?
|
| * Who will fix the server when it breaks at midnight? Who will
| pay them?
|
| * Who will pay for hosting if this is going to scale to the whole
| world? What is the funding model?
|
| The solution to bad companies - if you think Twitter on Musk will
| be terrible - is better companies. It is not software run by a
| collective of Boy Scouts.
| root_axis wrote:
| All good points, but I think more important than any of them:
| lacking billions of dollars for growth hacking. These gigantic
| social media sites didn't become huge organically, they've all
| dumped boatloads of cash into growing the user base, something
| a federated social network can never do.
| dgudkov wrote:
| The more I read about Mastodon, the more I think wont' take off
| (unless a deep redesign will be done) and the more I think
| ActivityPub will succeed.
|
| The problem with Twitter and Mastodon is that they both are based
| on poor abstractions of how humans communicate. They just don't
| model it well enough. For instance, they completely ignore the
| basic fact that one person can have multiple interests and
| communicates with different groups of people depending on
| interests. Humans are multifaceted things, after all.
|
| Another problem is with monetization. There must be paid
| instances of Mastodon or whatever federated it will be replaced
| with. Techno-communizm won't work, we've seen it so many times.
| Yet, here we are again.
| jlpom wrote:
| The absence of global search outside of #s is annoying.
| dcj4 wrote:
| Twitter is a great Mastodon alternative.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| I am coming around more and more to the metaphor that "mastodon
| is email and activitypub is SMTP". At which point for good or ill
| verification becomes a server-level problem: see
| http://blog.archive.org/2022/11/13/we-have-added-a-mastodon-... ;
| archive.org has a staff-only server, and we'll know if
| interesting things are afoot if potus@whitehouse.pub or
| mayor@yourtown.gov or whatever start to exist.
| CharlesW wrote:
| "Mastodon is WordPress + a feed reader, posts are posts, and
| ActivityPub is RSS" is also a near-perfect metaphor.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "blogrolls that work!"
| Kye wrote:
| ActivityStreams are RSS. ActivityPub is Yahoo Pipes.
| autotune wrote:
| My primary reason for not setting up Mastodon myself is I don't
| want to be a content moderator. I am seeing more and more links
| to content in various Mastodon Servers in one of the more forward
| thinking Slack groups I remain apart of and think that is a great
| thing.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > I don't want to be a content moderator.
|
| If you're the only user on your server, there's no much
| moderating to do, I find. Might have to block an instance or
| remote user now and then but that'd be the same on any
| instance.
| autotune wrote:
| That too. I also don't want to have to deal with marketing
| lol. There is a reason I am not interested in becoming an
| entrepreneur of anything.
| ancientworldnow wrote:
| Why would you need to market? You just follow users on
| other servers and post your thoughts. It's no more
| marketing than any social space has to be.
| autotune wrote:
| Oh it's that connected? For some reason I thought it was
| more involved. Maybe I will look into hosting it on the
| personal EKS cluster and get some real use out of it
| looks like it would be as simple as installing the
| https://artifacthub.io/packages/helm/si-gitops/mastodon
| helm chart and setting up a domain. Thanks for convincing
| me ha.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Unless you want 100% Mastodon API / quirks compatibility,
| I'd skip the original Mastodon source and go for
| something like Akkoma[1] (it's a fork of Pleroma) -
| easier to install and much lighter in resource use.
|
| If you're only ever going to be single-user, Ktistec[2]
| might be worth a look
|
| Or if you want to go ultra-minimal, there's Honk[3].
|
| (GoToSocial is an up-and-comer but I'm having weird
| issues with it talking to other instances. But they're
| working on these things.)
|
| [1] https://akkoma.dev/AkkomaGang/akkoma/
|
| [2] https://github.com/toddsundsted/ktistec
|
| [3] https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk
| autotune wrote:
| I kind of just want to self host right now with 100%
| Mastodon API compatibility, but I am a SRE and enjoy
| making personal infrastructure needlessly complex to
| reflect what you might see in an enterprise setup :)
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| How does federation propagation happen?
|
| Ie if i start my own server, how quickly could someone
| on, say, mastodon.art see my posts? Would they even see
| them at all?
|
| I use them as an example, because i know they're fairly
| locked down on who they federate with. In doing so, maybe
| they only whitelist? Maybe they blacklist? Maybe they
| automatically blacklist any servers that aren't perfectly
| aligned with their own blacklist?
|
| Federation feels a bit convoluted in a way that email
| doesn't. Then again email became so convoluted that only
| a few big players are even really allowed.. so maybe
| Mastodon is heading in the same direction?
| blep_ wrote:
| > how quickly could someone on, say, mastodon.art see my
| posts? Would they even see them at all?
|
| As soon as someone from there follows you. Post
| federation is based entirely on that.
|
| The bootstrapping process here is social, not technical,
| and usually looks like "follow a few people and some of
| them will follow you back and boost your stuff".
|
| Since you asked about .art specifically, I run a single
| user instance and I can follow people there. I'm pretty
| sure they just blacklist aggressively.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > As soon as someone from there follows you. Post
| federation is based entirely on that.
|
| There's also relays which will send out your posts
| (assuming your instance is subscribed to a relay) to all
| the other instances (but not users - this just puts them
| in the "federated" timeline, not individual ones)
| subscribed to that relay as a kind of "wider Fedivee
| view".
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| If you reply to people on something like .art, would they
| see your post? I need to read the spec about how
| federation works, as i have no clue haha.
|
| Which might be a significant barrier. Non-tech users
| might have no clue who sees what. If ServerA can talk to
| ServerB. etc
| rakoo wrote:
| Why yes, if you reply to someone they will see you reply,
| unless they or their admin has blocked you or your
| instance. Just like any federated network.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| > unless they or their admin has blocked you or your
| instance. Just like any federated network.
|
| That's kinda the part i'm questioning though. You as a
| user have to look at how each server handles federation
| to know what is visible.. maybe?
|
| For sake of argument, it might be possible to one-way-
| federate. Ie read posts from mastodon.art, but if i reply
| my post might not be seen by mastodon.art users. This is
| just an example, i have no clue, but i'm illustrating
| where confusing could arise as rules get more complex on
| how federation works.
|
| Hopefully it's black and white. If i as a user can see
| mastodon.art posts, then they can see me. Anything more
| complex than that (like one-way federation) would be
| prevented by the software for sake of a simplified UX.
| rakoo wrote:
| Federation isn't symmetrical: I might be able to read
| mastodon.art posts, but be blocked such that people there
| can't see me. But that's not really an issue. Being part
| of the fediverse is learning that people may not want to
| hear about you, for reasons unknown to you. Maybe bad
| reasons. But that's ok. You are not owed an audience. And
| maybe, if you are blocked, there is a good reason for
| that. On the fediverse there is a high value in the
| interactions and the relationships, so if a connection is
| to happen the individuals will do what is needed to make
| it happen.
|
| Maybe an instance blocks you. Maybe not. Fret not, it
| will be ok; you will have interactions with other people
| anyway.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Eh, i disagree. If i have the option to join a niche
| community or be external to it - i feel you just made an
| argument against federation. I should join the community,
| so that i'm not arbitrarily blocked for reasons out of my
| control. If i get kicked out at least i'll know, and it
| was likely due to my own actions.
|
| Ie imagine mastodon.art has a good Blender community. I'm
| joining Mastodon _for_ exactly that community. If i join
| mastodon.social, i may as well .. not. It 's blocked by
| mastodon.art. It's not even worth my time signing up if
| my goal is to be part of a specific community.
|
| I'm not trying to build a general audience or have my
| general posts heard by the public. I'm trying to be part
| of a specific community. Federation seems bad here, if
| the community you're interested in is not fully open at
| least. As mastodon.art most certainly is not.
| toofy wrote:
| if you're not trying to have your posts heard by the
| public, then why would you be concerned who mastodon.art
| is federated with? wouldn't you just join there and enjoy
| the specific community...
|
| > I'm not trying to build a general audience or have my
| general posts be heard by the public.
|
| > i'm trying to be part of a specific community.
|
| > Federation seems bad here if the community is not fully
| open.
|
| these seem to entirely contradict each other.
| panzi wrote:
| If you reply to someone using a hotmail address via your
| gmail account, would they see your email?
| johnklos wrote:
| You know, I think there are a lot of people who completely miss
| one important aspect of Mastodon: while it's open source, it's
| EXTREMELY Linux-centric. While people have gotten it running on
| other platforms, it's fraught with problems and assumptions.
|
| Then add that Ruby on Rails has a history of breaking when trying
| to update to keep ahead of security vulnerabilities, and we may
| expect to see some big security issues when something is found
| that's exploitable and updating breaks things, and everyone is
| sitting around waiting for the Mastodon people and/or the Docker
| image makers to update things properly.
|
| Mastodon would be improved by spending more energy making fewer
| assumptions about the underlying OS and being less dependent on
| specific versions of underlying Ruby components.
| kurt44 wrote:
| > Defederation: A server can decide to never communicate with
| some other specific server. Your vegan community server could
| decide not to federate with the safari hunter community server,
| because of the clash of interests. That's good, it helps focus
| you on what you want to see and keeps communities cohesive. It
| gives server admins a giant kill switch to keep their servers
| safe.
|
| Server admins, X have two switches for defederation another
| server Y:
|
| 1. X silences Y: posts from X aren't visible on X's public
| timelines. 2. X blocks Y: users on X are unable to follow users
| from Y.
|
| I see how silencing can be seen as keeping users safe.
| Unsuspecting users of X might not want to see messages from Y.
|
| I don't see how blocking for content moderation is reasonable:
| users of X have to opt in to users of Y to see their content
| anyway.
| aquova wrote:
| I agree with some of the complaints mentioned here. The biggest
| hurdle to joining Mastodon is deciding which server you actually
| want to join, which has a big impact on your experience and isn't
| (and probably can't be) clear to a new user. I'm not sure what
| they can really do for a better onboarding experience. Perhaps
| one of those "pick which topic most interests you" wizards, which
| then will give a user a list of servers that have identified
| themselves as catering towards those types of users. Even then, I
| don't think this will really help things, and will probably just
| drive traffic to the biggest servers.
|
| As for some of his other issues, I've been pleased to see that
| de-centralization hasn't happened largely, as there's been a
| large number of new servers popping up. I thought as well that
| Twitter exiles would likely congregate to a few large servers,
| but I've seen a pretty diverse listing of servers in my own
| feeds.
|
| > Your handle on Mastodon is more complicated than on Twitter,
| because you need to name your server also.
|
| I actually like this, it gives a sense of what types of topics
| the user is interested in, and what their profile is likely to
| focus on.
| butz wrote:
| Not sure if someone has already coined a term for "a feeling
| when you don't know which Mastodon server to join", but I'm
| currently here. I am probably wrong, but joining some themed
| server makes me think that I should be writing and discussing
| only about that theme and nothing else. Or joining a server not
| from your region just feels wrong. Of course, I could just spin
| my own instance, but how to make it attractive to other users,
| because one user per server ain't very optimal.
| rakoo wrote:
| One user per server is absolutelty fine. Don't fall for the
| hype telling you that you MUST be part of an existing
| instance: the Fediverse goes beyond your server.
|
| Honestly at this point if you don't want to self host just
| pick any random instance. If/when you decide it's not the
| right fit, moving is a straightforward operation.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| They have now:
|
| Masto-daunted.
| ftio wrote:
| Yes, I believe you're referring to Mastodoubt. I have it as
| well.
|
| I've had an account on mastodon.social for ages, but there's
| nobody there talking about topics I care about.
| pbronez wrote:
| I wound up creating two. One is on hachyderm.io, which is a
| medium-large instance with lots of k8s nerds. The other is
| self hosted.
|
| I'm leaning towards just keeping the hachyderm account.
| Self hosting on digital ocean is a bit more than $50/mo.
| Instance is underutilized with basically just me on there.
| I think I'll maintain a self-hosted fediverse home, but:
|
| - I want to run it in my homelab to avoid cloud fees
|
| - I'll move from Mastodon to something lighter, like maybe
| Pleroma.
|
| - I need to figure out how to bootstrap enough
| subscriptions to make an independent instance useful.
|
| Really, I think we need more managed hosting options. The
| only one I know of is masto.host, and they've frozen
| signups.
| tobylane wrote:
| I had Mastodoubt, torn between not mastodon.social because
| it's going to be too big and internetofshit's server because
| that's silly and small. I read that a searcher will only see
| you if there's already a connection between their server and
| yours. I went with mastodon.world.
|
| Next: find an appealing mobile app.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| Fedilab, from F-Droid, ties into ntfy.sh [0], which is
| _wonderful_. It means I still recieve notifications from
| Fedilab and Element, without needing Google Play Services.
|
| [0] https://ntfy.sh/
| dossy wrote:
| Ned's spot on. The single thing that's kept me from
| joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around
| which server I "should" join, whether I should start my own
| server, or if I join someone else's server, how portable is my
| content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my
| account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or
| even not possible at all?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > which server I "should" join
|
| Any you want as long as you're happy with their rules.
|
| > whether I should start my own server
|
| It's currently faff (but potentially getting better.)
|
| > how portable is my content/profile - can I export it
| all/import it all into my account on another server easily
|
| You can move your account with followers easily (but not
| posts). Can take a while for everything to filter through on
| busy servers though.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That last point is a doozy. Mastodon servers can be as bad as
| subreddits with power tripping mods, and you don't
| necessarily know that until the day you cross a line that you
| didn't know existed, just like on reddit.
|
| And then your account gets nuked and you can't migrate your
| posts.
|
| Going from one server (Twitter) to multiple smaller servers
| doesn't seem to go far enough on the axis to address major
| issues that Twitter has. e.g. you still don't "own" your
| content.
| dossy wrote:
| > [...] until the day you cross a line that you didn't know
| existed, [...] And then your account gets nuked and you
| can't migrate your posts.
|
| Exactly. This is the critical flaw in Mastodon's design. It
| does not solve the single biggest flaw in Twitter (or any
| other typical platform) design, where the platform operator
| owns the network, and not the author/user.
|
| This is why I won't bother investing my own personal time
| and effort in joining anyone else's server, given how the
| current design is implemented.
|
| It's sad that BitTorrent has now existed for 21 years, and
| still no one has built a social media content distribution
| network on top of it. I would have done it but I don't have
| the motivation to do it alone, as it would tilt control
| away from the platform operators who require that control
| in order to monetize the platform to make it worth the
| investment.
|
| :sigh:
| toofy wrote:
| > ...doesn't seem to go far enough on the axis to address
| major issues that Twitter has. e.g. you still don't "own"
| your content.
|
| it goes much further than twitter does--unlike twitter, you
| can spin up your own server and you are now in control of
| your content.
|
| same with modding. if owning your content is the most
| important feature for you, it's significantly better than
| twitter.
|
| if owning your own content and moderating are your largest
| concerns, what do you propose as an alternative that
| addresses these, today?
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > e.g. you still don't "own" your content.
|
| If you're not running your own server, true.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > And then your account gets nuked and you can't migrate
| your posts.
|
| Well, you pretty much can't migrate your posts anyway even
| if you're moving without being nuked. But if you get nuked,
| you probably can't move your followers either which would
| suck.
| toofy wrote:
| does twitter have this problem solved?
| dossy wrote:
| > You can move your account with followers easily (but not
| posts).
|
| That's what I thought based on what I've read so far, thanks
| for confirming.
|
| Unless and until that's fixed, if I finally see enough value
| in joining Mastodon, I will have to do so using my own server
| where I have full access to all my content.
| vidarh wrote:
| You can _export_ all your content, including posts, but
| Mastodon doesn 't support directly _importing_ posts, so
| you need either a (very) friendly admin or your own server
| if you want to import it somewhere new.
| pbronez wrote:
| Yeah this is probably a needed feature. There are some
| good philosophical objections to post imports, but
| they're overwhelmed by practical arguments for it. it's a
| solvable problem.
| vidarh wrote:
| Absolutely agree. I think solutions will come, but they
| may well come as an extension or fork first until it's
| pointless for the core developers to resist.
|
| It's particularly idiotic because the Activities in the
| export are all _signed_ , so an importing server just
| need to do a webfinger and profile lookup, and can then
| validate all of the posts. Of course you can still fake
| them, but if you show a "moved from <origin instance>" on
| them, that's really all you need to do - moves from, say,
| mastodon.social would be trustworthy, moves from some
| small instance would not.
|
| But even that can be fixed with tamper proof timestamps
| and signing the whole archive, and in any case you can
| validate this against the public API because it remains
| accessible on the origin server (at least for some time
| after the initial move, I don't know how long).
| tedunangst wrote:
| And yet, you somehow managed to pick HN over reddit over TikTok
| or slack or discord or 100 other options. Or maybe all of the
| above.
|
| I'll never get the hand wringing over missing out on posts on
| some other server. There's tweets and reddits and tiktoks all
| over the place you'll never see. The lesson should be to make
| peace with that, not try to find them all.
| qudat wrote:
| The primary UX between servers is the "local feed." This is a
| feed dedicated to all posts within the server. You can't really
| access that feed from outside of a server. That's pretty much
| it. You can follow people on other servers, at-metnion, etc.
|
| Starting your own server is a waste of time, imo.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Many servers allow their Local Timeline to be browsed by
| anyone. From the server's home page, click the "Local" button
| to the top-right. If you find a person or post you want to
| interact with, simply copy and paste its URL into the search
| bar of your app or home server.
| toofy wrote:
| not sure why they're downvoting you, what you said is
| absolutely accurate.
| rakoo wrote:
| > whether I should start my own server
|
| This is the right answer. All the questions about moderation,
| resources, choice and whatever will disappear and you'll be
| part of the Fediverse like anyone else.
| zeeZ wrote:
| I wonder how easy it is for a small instance to get
| overwhelmed quickly, though.
|
| One of my responses to Nova got boosted by her, and my media
| storage and database size immediately spiked (600MiB to
| 1.3GiB and 20MiB to 42MiB). Requests went from none to
| 20/sec, just by that triggering more people to favorite and
| boost.
|
| I imagine if I ever manage to post something profound that
| someone with even greater influence happens to like, my
| server will be doomed.
| rakoo wrote:
| 20 requests/sec is absolutely nothing for a server in 2022.
| Even if you have many relationships, any individual server
| will handle the load without any fuss. Worth that can
| happen is a few minutes in the propagation of messages,
| which is not exactly a big problem. Seriously, there is no
| technical reasons we don't self-host; only "cultural" ones
| (it's hard, it's work, it's painful, and such)
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Ned 's spot on._
|
| Definitely. This is a great post that helps explain to
| technical folks why Mastodon is not (and will never be) a
| replacement for Twitter, which I say as a Mastodon user and
| fan. If something has a chance to displace Twitter, it'll need
| to be as dead-simple to use (like Hive1).
|
| > _The single thing that 's kept me from joining/participating
| in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I
| "should" join..._
|
| If you're looking for an opinionated answer to this question by
| someone who's just gone through this, for HN readers I can also
| recommend the instance mentioned in the article: hachyderm.io.
| There are a lot of tech and otherwise-interesting people there,
| and it's run by Kris Nova2. Her most recent articles on Medium
| talk about running an instance as a serious endeavor.
|
| > _...if I join someone else 's server, how portable is my
| content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my
| account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or
| even not possible at all?_
|
| Kris's most recent post, "Experimenting with Federation and
| Migrating Accounts"3, goes into detail on how this works in
| practice.
|
| 1 https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/twitter-alternative-
| hive-j... 2 SME in Linux kernel security, distributed systems
| and infrastructure management, and open-source software
| engineering. https://medium.com/@kris-nova 3
| https://medium.com/@kris-nova/experimenting-with-federation-...
| dossy wrote:
| Thanks, @CharlesW. I'm familiar with Kris and follow her on
| Twitter, and see a lot of people have opted to join her
| Mastodon server, which is great, but her explanation of what
| happened when she tried to migrate her account from one
| server to another, where she even controlled both, points to
| the weakness in the fundamental Mastodon design that makes it
| a non-starter for me.
|
| Being able to export all of your data (posts, followers,
| following, blocks/mutes, etc.) and to import it into another
| server MUST be table stakes at this point. Otherwise, you're
| just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish,
| because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't
| repeat itself.
|
| I'll keep watching from the sidelines and see if the
| fundamental issues get resolved. It certainly will be
| interesting to see how things play out, that's for sure!
| emptysongglass wrote:
| > Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another,
| which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that
| history doesn't repeat itself.
|
| I don't see how you can come to this conclusion. Twitter is
| not a protocol, is a corporation with a profit-motive, and
| sees itself as the town square of the internet with its
| design geared toward this function.
|
| Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another
| Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely what
| makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter
| emigrants.
|
| Are there other protocols that fix some of ActivityPub's
| design flaws? Yes, like nostr and Bluesky's AT Protocol.
| But ActivityPub, being an open protocol, can also be
| massaged into a better one by its community.
|
| Personally, I've found my corner of Mastodon to be a much
| kinder place than Twitter perhaps _because_ it does not
| profess to be the town square of the internet nor pursues
| that status.
|
| Ultimately, I think what we're seeing here is the
| transparent lie sold to us by Meta and Twitter and
| Instagram: that social media superapps that try to tie the
| world together are not forces of good to unite but
| ultimately weapons that serve to divide it. We are not
| equipped as a species for the cacophonous screams of
| billions, only the Bodhisattva of compassion Kuan-Yin, She
| Who Hears the Cries of the of World, can do this, and she
| arguably doesn't exist.
|
| So yes, you are at the mercy of whatever server mods you
| happen to drift to on Mastodon but you are not powerless,
| like on Twitter.
| dossy wrote:
| > Mastodon is about as far from trading in for another
| Twitter alternative as you can come and that's largely
| what makes its design so difficult to grasp for Twitter
| emigrants.
|
| A protocol has no inherent value. Its value comes from
| its application. And, Mastodon, as one of ActivityPub's
| applications, is nothing better than Twitter fractured
| into many smaller islands of Twitter: instead of
| upsetting Elon and getting the boot, if you upset the
| Mastodon server operator you happen to choose, you run
| the same exact risk of being deported off that particular
| island. If you're going to subject yourself to the whims
| of a dictator, you might as well stay on Twitter and reap
| the benefits of the larger network.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| You've ignored all of my salient points. Of course
| Mastodon offers significant advantages for all of the
| reasons I just described. Of course a protocol has
| inherent value. Its value is inhered by giving users the
| option to walk away whenever they want or implement their
| own server.
|
| You've completely ignored the arrest of user behavior and
| audience that happens when a single proprietary
| application is allowed to own the social sphere of the
| public.
|
| The whims of a dictator become a lot less impactful when
| users can _just walk away_. The consequences are
| massively different when the entire captive audience is
| on one platform and feels they _must remain_ because
| there is no other option with critical mass. With
| federation, critical mass is spread out over the
| protocol, yes a value _inhered in the protocol itself_.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| I used this website a few days ago to find a suitable server:
| https://instances.social/
|
| And then https://movetodon.org/ to find some of my twitter
| contacts on mastodon.
|
| As for importing/exporting accounts, they have some
| documentation for that:
| https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
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