[HN Gopher] We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
___________________________________________________________________
We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
Author : 6502nerdface
Score : 123 points
Date : 2023-01-25 13:12 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| The tl;dr is "our lawyers and CEO hated it," which is sad for the
| author who was just trying to have some harmless fun, but is not
| surprising.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I think they also learned more about how toxic their active
| userbase actually is (I don't mean the general readership but
| people who comment.) You ever read the comments there? It's
| 100% trash.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| The comments went to trash ever since they sold subscriptions
| to universities, I am still upset about this. But yes they
| are not worth a peek these days
| yborg wrote:
| Alternative title: "We casually decided to run a social media
| site for a starched-collar pillar of the financial reporting
| community, and all we got out of it was some clever snark."
| KaiserPro wrote:
| > clever snark
|
| Thats the entire point of ftalphaville. Its a great read, and
| free, barring email signup
| istillwritecode wrote:
| ft.com epitomizes what is wrong with web, with a big ass modal
| about cookies that only goes away if you accept their cookies. I
| would be happy to see such sites go bankrupt because they piss of
| so many potential readers who won't see their ads.
| zoobab wrote:
| Saved on Archive.is: https://archive.is/vx6Sk
| bronikowski wrote:
| I run my one-person instance with gotosocial. Yeah, the
| attachments are a bit PITA. I'm federating with 167 other
| instances, I follow sub-100 people. gotosocial:
| du -h | tail -1 3.8G .
| andai wrote:
| > For obvious reasons, we can't use big-tech's trick of
| concentrating lobbying efforts by putting all our servers in
| Luxembourg or Ireland.
|
| Bullshit! I could do that, and I'm broke!
| zoobab wrote:
| About the "Social media bosses face jail under amendment to UK
| online safety bill" https://archive.is/kJh46
|
| At least with Nostr (compared to Mastodon) this won't be a
| problem anymore, at least some decent implementation of the
| declaration of independence of Cyberspace.
| zoobab wrote:
| https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1617623779626352640
|
| "the problem is that most major states are pressuring
| corporations to limit speech."
| WeylandYutani wrote:
| No advertisers do. Look to 4chan for free speech. No company
| in their right mind wants to have anything to do with it.
|
| Corporations want family friendly sites with only happy
| thoughts.
| Ralfp wrote:
| I also want a fun place to procrastinate on but for some
| reason most vocal ,,internet free speech advocates" are
| also the people who insist my feed should be mostly
| political agitation, aggressive content that targets people
| or minorities and news to piss me off, otherwise I am one
| of the ,,sheeple".
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| No one cares about your feed. If you don't want
| "political agitation, aggressive content that targets
| people or minorities and news to piss me off" on your
| feed, then don't follow people who post this kind of
| stuff.
| manimino wrote:
| That description just sounds like regular news and social
| media.
| artificial wrote:
| Once something becomes a number it ceases to be a metric?
| It's all about eyeballs and ads focused around
| engagement. Reminds me of a clip of dogs aggressively
| barking at one another behind a fence or glass door.
| [deleted]
| HardlyCurious wrote:
| This talking point gets repeated a lot, and it is really
| disingenuous.
|
| What you are saying has absolutely nothing to do with
| legitimate medical doctors being deplatformed because they
| have an off script opinion of how society should respond to
| covid.
|
| It has nothing to do with kicking trump off Twitter.
|
| What you are saying has nothing to do with any of the
| 'moderation' that anyone is actually complaining about.
| [deleted]
| IncRnd wrote:
| https://archive.is/20230125120906/https://www.ft.com/content...
| 6502nerdface wrote:
| https://archive.ph/AoOno
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > " _After just a month our barely visible Fediverse presence was
| taking up 160 gigabytes_ "
| jherskovic wrote:
| Federated content is copied to every instance, so yes, follow a
| few people and you can see your instance's disk usage explode.
| I run an instance for some friends.
|
| The usage can be contained with a few cron jobs to purge old
| cached content aggressively. Running
|
| `tootctl statuses remove && tootctl media remove` once a week
| is enough to make it sane in my case.
| jherskovic wrote:
| To add to this, you can also set it up so entire federated
| servers are followed, and it may be that way by default. So
| follow ONE person on mastodon.social, and suddenly your toy
| instance is trying to copy a significant chunk of the
| Fediverse to its hard drive in real time.
| asmor wrote:
| That's done via relay servers, you can't just firehose an
| entire server without its cooperation.
| jherskovic wrote:
| You're correct. I forgot about that. I did try relaying
| for a while, that's what made the usage REALLY explode.
| smcl wrote:
| The "160 gigabytes" text was linked to the Johnny Mnemonic
| wikipedia page, so it it possible they're just exaggerating and
| meant "it was growing at a rate we didn't expect or couldn't
| really sustain"?
|
| This got me wondering, I created a Mastodon user @
| defcon.social and my first couple of posts were images, just to
| test things out and get started with my chosen client - Ivory
| by Tapbots (the creators of Tweetdeck, RIP) after tptacek spoke
| glowingly of it here. Then I realised that by posting those I'm
| basically taking up space on a community service without paying
| for it, and I wasn't sure exactly what the etiquette was. On a
| commercial, monetised service like Twitter it's different as
| there are advertisers (or at least there _were_...) but afaik
| "defcon.social" is just a non-profit and I'd really like not to
| be a big cost sink.
|
| Also I wondered if there's any overhead involved in following
| users across many different instances - if my @defcon.social
| user follows a bunch of users on various other instances does
| that place additional burden on their mastodon instance or just
| on my local client?
|
| Might be time for me to read the defcon.social fine print and
| T&Cs (I only glanced over it) or even about
| Mastodon/ActivityPub generally...
| UncleEntity wrote:
| From what I can gather every follower gets an individual copy
| of every post sent to their server who either deduplicates it
| and stores it in their database or just stores the message
| per subscriber.
|
| So if 10,000 people on server A subscribe to someone on
| server B then server B will send 10,000 duplicate messages to
| server A.
|
| I hope I'm wrong but that's what I've heard.
| librexpr wrote:
| I wish people wouldn't spread rumors like this. ActivityPub
| does have shared inboxes[0] and Mastodon does use them[1],
| so no duplicate messages will be sent in your example.
|
| [0] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#x7-1-3-shared-inbox-
| deliv...
|
| [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/blob/a5a00d7f7adff
| 5e0af...
| maegul wrote:
| Oh my! I'd heard ActivityPub was chatty but haven't looked
| into the details. This, if true, sounds ... not good.
|
| Anyone with expertise here who can speak to the scaling of
| ActivityPub?
| mariusor wrote:
| The size of an ActivityPub payload overhead is minimal.
|
| On each individual server they are ideally saved based on
| their unique identifier (which are RFC3987 IRIs) and I
| doubt that there is any software that will do it
| individually for each inbox instead of storing one copy
| to which each inbox links to.
|
| To minimize even this, each server can store just the
| IRI(which is mandated to be de-referenceable) and load
| the payload when prompted by UI. I doubt that anyone does
| this also.
| maegul wrote:
| Yes that makes sense! Thanks!
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Reminds me of:
|
| > This program posts news to thousands of machines
| throughout the entire civilized world. You message will
| cost the net hundreds if not thousands of dollars to send
| everywhere. Please be sure you know what you are doing.
|
| From the rn usenet client, back in the day.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Maybe if more people thought this, a lot less posts would
| be made. I'm guessing that would be a net positive for
| society in general.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > Maybe if more people thought this, a lot less posts
| would be made
|
| This is why we can't have nice things: https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
| stnmtn wrote:
| Why are tech people so behind mastodon? If this is true
| this sounds incredibly worrying to scale; to the point
| where mastodon is limiting it's own growth potential
| smcl wrote:
| Remember there's a fair bit of speculation here, I just
| thoughtlessly blasted my question here without
| researching (not sure where to start, tbh) and
| UncleEntity didn't seem too sure about the
| duplicated/redundant requests. It's entirely possible
| that Mastodon doesn't have this problem
| dylan604 wrote:
| If. Did you research _if_ this was true before posting a
| knee jerk reaction to something that _might_ not be true?
| _If_ not, you are no better than the person that posted
| the misleading comment.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I mainly use twitter to keep tabs on some artists and none of
| them want to move. Reading this, maybe it is for the best. My
| follows would create a lot of overhead for wherever it is I
| park my account compared to someone who just participates in
| text.
| [deleted]
| KaiserPro wrote:
| I have my own instance, and it eats disk space, in a fun and
| sometimes difficult to recover way.
|
| It caches all media that you view, and I assume it might
| prefetch stuff to. It has a tool that prunes out old cached
| images and such. However that script isn't setup to run
| automatically (or if it is, its far too loosey-goosey)
|
| However the biggest killer is that it doesn't clear cached
| user page header images. Here is the output of my cache.
| Headers are not cleaned, and need to be deleted manually.
| Attachments: 1.43 GB (8.19 MB local) Custom emoji: 61.9
| MB (0 Bytes local) Preview cards: 344 MB Avatars:
| 3.01 GB (71.7 KB local) Headers: 6.69 GB (172 KB local)
| Backups: 0 Bytes Imports: 0 Bytes Settings: 36.2
| KB
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's $3/month on S3.
|
| My personal instance has been up two months with 12 GB space
| used, but only 88 MB of that is my stuff; the rest is just the
| cache of others' posts. That can be fairly aggressively cleared
| out, and I think Mastodon lets you configure an automatic
| purging of this data.
| smcl wrote:
| I was very tempted to create and operate an instance for me
| and my friends, since Digital Ocean have a nice pre-built
| image that's ready to go, but it never left the "that would
| be fun, I should read into that" phase. I hope you don't mind
| but I'm about to fire off a bunch of questions - if you're
| too busy to answer or just don't feel like answering, I won't
| feel offended :) How are you finding it, is it just yourself
| or do you have a few more users? Do you have to deal with
| abuse/spam much? Also what kind of hardware do you have it on
| - is it pretty memory/cpu hungry ever or is it quite well-
| behaved?
| asmor wrote:
| Akkoma is a very good option if you're concerned about
| resource usage. I proxy media from other servers and then
| let it hit a managed CDN (bunny.net in this case). My CDN
| bill is less than 10 cents per month.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Mine's on masto.host, so it's managed; costs me a few bucks
| a month and I'm happy with it. It's just for me, so all my
| follows are federated; as such, spam/abuse has been non-
| existent.
| smcl wrote:
| Ah I hadn't heard of masto.host, ok that's another thing
| to look into. Thanks!
| yabones wrote:
| 2 cores and 4 GB memory is more than adequate for a <10
| users. My instance runs on an old Celeron NUC sitting on
| the shelf above the litter box and connects to the internet
| through a cloudflare tunnel. Works great, and is basically
| free to run.
| smcl wrote:
| Ah funny, I didn't think to look if there was tunneling
| that let me serve local stuff publicly (I have a NUC
| tucked away somewhere in my flat, I had it serving some
| stuff thru SSH tunneling to a Digital Ocean droplet until
| I realised "why am I not just running this on my
| droplet?")
| biorach wrote:
| > Meanwhile, for the benefit of... Morgan Stanley's Distressed
| Debt & Special Situations team, here are a few things we learned
| about why taking responsibility for a social media site is a bad
| idea...
|
| that made me laugh out loud
| marban wrote:
| Mastodon is the move to Canada equivalent of social media.
| __derek__ wrote:
| Mastodon instances are the (latest) new monorail.[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGg5rfBfWT4
| yborg wrote:
| If 10M people moved to Canada its population would have
| increased by 25%.
| bryceelder wrote:
| Hello! Author of the story here. Happy to answer any questions.
|
| Though we all love archive.ph, FT Alphaville isn't behind a
| paywall. Email registration -- on the far right of the barrier
| page -- gives unlimited access.
|
| I set up the server during the peak exodus from Twitter. We use
| Twitter a lot, both to get stories out and to listen to readers,
| so the risk of it dying was very real. We made the decision to
| get a minimal-viable-product up asap, to give our Twitter refugee
| readers somewhere to go.
|
| Urgency to act meant avoiding committees and working the
| difficult stuff out later. But Twitter survived, 'Don user
| engagement was meh, and the difficult stuff became not worth it.
|
| The 160gb thing isn't _just_ a Johnny Mnemonic reference. I 'm a
| lazy coder who relies on cludges, so my 'Don deployment was a
| mess of duplication and surplus. About three weeks after launch
| the server hit 100% storage and crashed. I had the option of
| fixing the code or buying more space. Because I'm lazy I took the
| second option. A week later it hit 100% and crashed again.
|
| Though it was obvious the setup was broken, the long-term
| strategy of repair always lost out to the short-term fix of
| buying more space.
|
| We talked about keeping the server going but restricting it to
| staff only. Ultimately though, it still involved jumping through
| many hoops to make everything compliant, and while we all like
| the Fediverse to varying degrees it hasn't yet become essential
| to our work. We just couldn't justify the time required.
|
| Maybe the FT can be convinced into doing something official
| eventually. I'm certainly not against it, so long as I'm not
| involved in the IT or legal side.
| elicksaur wrote:
| Email registration is paying with information rather than
| money.
| bryceelder wrote:
| Use a burner. We neither check nor care.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| whats the difference between mastodon and say the
| longroom(rip)? From what I remember Long room didn't have any
| outside moderators (like the comments section does)
|
| was it the sheer amount of content, or just that it was outside
| the sphere of support (both legal and technical) to be useful?
| bryceelder wrote:
| The Long Room was difficult for other reasons. Everything
| there was on FT webspace and was built by FT people, but with
| strictly limited access, so the compliance folks were
| comfortable. Moderation was light but within our control.
| Risks were known, therefore manageable. The eventual decision
| to kill LR was taken largely in the hope that we could
| replace it with something better. That's a work in progress.
| jph wrote:
| Kudos Bryce for writing the story and also for posting here.
| This is a great story from the trenches.
| xrayarx wrote:
| About running a mastodon instance
|
| Quote: "It is therefore with relief and regret that we announce
| the shutdown of Alphaville.club, this blog's completely
| unofficial home on the Fediverse. Our reasons are listed below in
| full but, to summarise, Mastodon has proved more hassle than its
| worth."
| pmarreck wrote:
| I mean, the relative cost really depends on how much you value
| having one up that you control, I suppose.
|
| I also think Pleroma or one of its forks (Akkoma, etc.) might
| be far less hassle to run while still being compatible with the
| same metaverse protocol, because Elixir (with erlang/OTP
| underneath) is _far_ more resource-efficient than Ruby is (we
| 're talking orders of magnitude more efficient in both CPU and
| memory efficiency, although content storage demands would
| likely remain necessary to keep a lasso on)
| pja wrote:
| Mastodon instances do seem to cache a /lot/ of content from
| peer servers in the interests of user-perceived latency.
| incomingpain wrote:
| [flagged]
| croes wrote:
| Freedom of speech itself can be used to hinder others freedom
| of speech.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >Freedom of speech itself can be used to hinder others
| freedom of speech.
|
| I've never seen anyone say this before. Could you elaborate
| how? Like speaking over someone so they may not speak?
| croes wrote:
| That's how non physical bullying and cyberbullying works.
|
| That's one of the reasons the whole hate speech topic
| became an issue.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > That's how non physical bullying and cyberbullying
| works.
|
| How?
|
| edit: you've just picked another (tautological) form of
| speech for which you're not explaining how it suppresses
| the freedom of others to speak. The question-begging word
| "bullying" here is the hint. The "bully" would refer to
| it as commentary, not bullying.
|
| Can Donald Trump be bullied? Can a racist mass shooter?
| "Bullying" is a value judgement.
| croes wrote:
| https://www.wtps.org/cms/lib8/NJ01912980/Centricity/Domai
| n/7...
|
| I think people who kill themselves are pretty much
| finally suppressed in their freedom of speech.
| otuva wrote:
| I can't seem to make the connection here.
|
| If everyone is free to speak their minds, how can it be
| used to silence others?
|
| Even more improbable in the context of cyberbullying.
| Tyler the Creator's cyberbullying tweet appears to be
| more relevant than this take.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Obvious example: "I'll kill you if you don't shut up."
| otuva wrote:
| Oh, ok. But, I thought they were referring to the term
| freedom of speech as in the first amendment (not includes
| obscenity, child pornography, fighting words, and the
| advocacy of imminent lawless action) because they've
| given an example of cyberbullying
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| "I'll doxx you if you don't shut up"? Or, more generally,
| a constant barrage of things like "kill yourself" or
| "you're a [insert slur here]", which doesn't rise to a
| First Amendment violation but definitely has the effect
| of silencing people?
| croes wrote:
| Imagine dozens of people calling every comment you make
| wrong, unprofessional or dumb.
|
| There aren't many people for whom this would have no
| effect on the nature and quantity of their comments.
| mftrhu wrote:
| Intimidation is the act of using threats - direct and
| indirect - humiliation, embarrassment & co. to make other
| people too fearful to perform actions which they would
| otherwise be free to engage in.
|
| For that, speech is usually more than enough, especially if
| performed by a large ingroup against a small outgroup.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Harrasment, doxing, threats, intimidation; there's all
| sorts of perfectly legal ways (or illegal-but-never-
| prosecuted ways, which count as "legal") to make people
| decide it's simply not worth saying certain things.
| LBJsPNS wrote:
| [flagged]
| Simplicitas wrote:
| I once shot a duck in my pajamas .. what it was doing there,
| I have no idea!
|
| Wait! It was an elephant.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >Quack quack quack quack quack.
|
| You identify as a duck?
|
| The stated goal of HN is to enable conversations and prevent
| becoming an echo chamber. guess they failed.
| axus wrote:
| Winston turned a little sideways in his chair to drink his
| mug of coffee. At the table on his left the man with the
| strident voice was still talking remorselessly away....He
| held some important post in the FICTION DEPARTMENT....It
| was just a noise, a quack-quack-quacking....Every word of
| it was pure orthodoxy, pure Ingsoc....Winston had a curious
| feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind
| of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it
| was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him
| consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true
| sense: it was noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the
| quacking of a duck.
| LBJsPNS wrote:
| Absurd premises receive absurd responses.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's absurd that the FBI meets with social media
| regularly to discuss which accounts or ideas to minimize,
| prioritize, ban, or make immune from ban? Or is it absurd
| to think that people should hear from their political
| opponents?
| Simplicitas wrote:
| Definitely a prisoner's dilemma .. an applicable take on where
| all this is going is Popper's Paradox Of Tolerance
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance). Not sure
| that Elon and many other seemingly well-intended social media
| free-speech advocates fully grasp the implications of this.
| pessimizer wrote:
| We simply cannot tolerate those who think that the government
| should have a hand in suppressing political speech.
| incomingpain wrote:
| >Definitely a prisoner's dilemma .. an applicable take on
| where all this is going is Popper's Paradox Of Tolerance
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance). Not
| sure that Elon and many other seemingly well-intended social
| media free-speech advocates fully grasp the implications of
| this.
|
| In terms of paradox of tolerance. Even in the USA, there are
| limits on free speech.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce.
| ..
|
| You cant advocate for violence in the USA. Not only is this
| not protected by free speech, it's a crime.
|
| The assertion of "tolerance without limit" doesnt apply.
| There's your limits right there.
|
| Elon's twitter never changed this rule. You may not advocate
| for violence on twitter. This is not in contradiction with
| Elon's free speech absolutism.
|
| What's important to understand is say Reddit who has
| eliminated free speech. What do you earn? You earn echo
| chambers, you divide your populous. You never solve your
| problems. Each side sees only the worst of the other side.
| Nobody talks to each other again. Political polarization is
| 100% because of no free speech on social media.
|
| >You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.
|
| I'm shadow banned and flagged on HN so I can't respond to you
| until it's lifted. Guess it was more than a 1 hour ban.
| Imagine attempting to have a conversation on HN and not being
| able to reply
|
| Good ole -10, goto jail for me. Thanks prisoners dilemma.
|
| How ironic, but not surprising. What a waste of time. So long
| and thanks for all the fish.
| motohagiography wrote:
| I could see them looking at HN and thinking, "FT readers are a
| cut above a bunch of computer repair people. Surely if they can
| have a civil public discourse, we can."
|
| They really do have some of the ingredients, but they are missing
| key ones. I'd say the biggest limitation to building a social
| platform from even as rarefied a captive demographic as their
| esteemed readership is that when your livelihood is based on
| relationships and narrative over concrete physical skills, the
| stakes on being controversial are too high.
|
| If you are a financial advisor and you are controversial in
| public and lose, among peers whose stock in trade is being
| aligned to the highest powers available, you lose your
| credibility and place in your pecking order. Whereas, if someone
| decides I'm on the wrong side of a narrative, I can still write
| code, build something, or make it work.
|
| Opinions are what we have when we're not actually doing the thing
| we have the opinion about, so it's my indulgence to be
| provocative about how well the world is being run - because I'm
| not the one doing it. All the world is indeed a stage, and
| getting all the best lines is almost fair compensation for having
| to put up with its managers. The issue of our time is that the
| people running the world think people like me have a bit too much
| freedom to mock their degenerate incompetence, and they think
| controlling public forums is going to be easier than doing a more
| credible job.
|
| There is an iron law about the trade off between autonomy and
| power, where power is to act through others, and autonomy is to
| act without others. Quality discourse (social media content), and
| news stories, require some kind of friction or conflict to make
| them interesting and compelling. This disqualifies powerful
| people from participating as themselves because the risk of
| alienating the people through whom they act is too high. (Musk is
| the exception that makes the rule.)
|
| The "social" in social media means that it's for kids and plebes
| like us who can afford to have drunk pictures of themselves on
| the internet because we aren't engaged in the all-against-all
| political power struggle that defines elite competition - the
| world most FT/Economist readers inhabit. My opinions have nothing
| to do with my ability to fix computers, where for the typical FT
| reader, their opinions signal their alignment, status, and
| reputation. They can't risk their reputations on making the kind
| of piquant online comment that makes this all so good.
|
| I'm glad they learned you can't just "start your own" social
| media platform, but that wasn't the real obstacle for them. It's
| that, they'll never (shit)post like common people.
| millzlane wrote:
| Is it true that admins have access to DM's?
| [deleted]
| Hamuko wrote:
| Your content is in the admin's database. You basically just
| have to trust that the admin has no reason and incentive to
| read your DMs, edit your toots and so on.
| est31 wrote:
| There seems to be no UI for it in the official mastodon code,
| but yes it's just one database lookup away (or a list of
| database lookups).
|
| I mean it's a common thing to not have end-to-end encryption.
| Gmail, Instagram, Discord, all can read DMs of logged in users.
|
| Something being open source doesn't mean it's end to end
| encrypted.
|
| Only some messengers have end to end encryption, like WhatsApp,
| Threema, Signal, etc. There are plans for mastodon to get E2EE
| as well, there is some backend work done but it seems to not be
| used in the mobile apps yet.
| recuter wrote:
| A paywalled article about neophytes rediscovering BBS culture
| isn't for everyone. This is the worst timeline.
| codetrotter wrote:
| Without paywall:
|
| https://archive.is/vx6Sk
| edent wrote:
| There's a difference between running your own instance for you or
| your own staff and running one for the public.
|
| I _should_ be able to follow @ClarkKent@mastodon.daily-
| planet.info - that 'll tell me that the account is who it says it
| is.
|
| But mastodon.daily-planet.info absolutely _shouldn 't_ have a
| public registration.
|
| Running a social network isn't for the faint-hearted. But running
| a publishing platform should be as simple as running a website.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >But running a publishing platform should be as simple as
| running a website.
|
| Why is this consider stupidly easy? What kind of website are
| talking about, because the websites I run and have run in the
| past are not so simple
| edent wrote:
| I didn't say "stupidly easy". I said "as simple as".
|
| If you're running a basic WordPress / CMS - then running
| Mastodon should be as simple as that (i.e. pay someone to
| host and run).
|
| If you're running a global website with a load of subdomains,
| custom features, CDNs, etc - then running Mastodon should be
| as simple as your existing infrastructure.
| dylan604 wrote:
| [flagged]
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| WordPress is as easy as websites get. My 70 year old
| father runs a handful of them. They are 1 click to
| install, and have a built in plugin system to add extra
| features.
|
| Running WP is easy for the majority of users.
| TylerE wrote:
| Yes. Until gramps forgets to update and he gets owned by
| scriptkiddies...usually via a hole in one of those
| plugins.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| He pays $40/mo for all of his sites, and included in that
| is hourly backups rolling for multiple days, security
| audits, automatic updates, and the ability to lock down
| logins to a specific IP.
|
| In the 8 years of hosting with wordpress, he's been under
| constant automated attack, and never once has a site been
| compromised. I doubt that is because he is some super
| computer genius, and more likely its just that his host
| has a decent offering.
|
| But point still stands, if a host allows you to click a
| button to launch a wordpress site, that is still easy to
| do.
| Fuzzwah wrote:
| The difference in what people think of as "running a
| website" is at play in this conversation.
|
| Administering a website hosted by WordPress.com isn't the
| same level of difficulty as being an admin of a LAMP
| based website on bare metal.
| TylerE wrote:
| Or (from personal experience helping multiple friends)
| running Wordpress on a commodity cpanel host.
| amyjess wrote:
| This is true to an extent, but the problem with Mastodon is
| that you have to be really careful about who you federate
| with. Hosting your own Mastodon is like hosting your own
| email in that unless you set up your anti-spam capabilities
| perfectly, you will get permanently blackholed by the wider
| community.
|
| Except it's not just spam. Most of the wider fediverse will
| block your instance if you federate with instances that
| host nazis, child porn, etc. Which means the first thing
| you need to do when setting up your instance is gather a
| list of all those types and block them. Sure, you can say
| you're committed to "free speech" or whatever, but if all
| the large servers slam the door in your face your users
| will have nobody to talk to.
|
| Also, with the way Mastodon works, if your instance
| federates with another, your instance hosts a cached copy
| of all of their stuff that appears on your users'
| timelines. Which means you might run afoul of your host's
| TOS or even local laws. If you're in Germany and some
| American nazi's post saying "kill the Jews" gets federated
| onto your instance, you might be looking at serious legal
| trouble. Or even if you're not in one of those countries,
| you might get booted off AWS or Azure for hosting content
| against their TOS.
|
| So sure, it's as easy enough as any other webapp to launch
| into your infra, but maintaining a functioning Mastodon
| instance that doesn't get blocked by the wider fediverse or
| brings down the wrath of your hosting company or law
| enforcement on you is hard.
| saurik wrote:
| I don't understand the "why" behind the second paragraph.
| (In contrast, you explain the tech more for the third
| paragraph.) To do a callback to the first paragraph, this
| is very unlike email: my email server barely has a
| working spam filter and explicitly will never actively
| reject email (or just organizes and tags it differently),
| and yet I am able to send and receive email from large
| hosts (or at least could until I lost my ancient IP
| address due to my colo provider moving to a different
| state, for which I weep; but that is an entirely
| unrelated issue, afaik ;P), as who _else_ I email is none
| of their business. What about the tech of Mastadon makes
| other nodes refuse to "federate with" me if I "federate
| with" something they don't like?
| amyjess wrote:
| No technical reasons, just the social mores of the wider
| community.
|
| Go to any large instance, hit up their about section and
| look at their list of banned servers: a good chunk of
| them have ban reasons like "'free speech' server that
| federates with gab and other nazis", etc.
| mflslsoam wrote:
| And the ones that ban Nazis are generally fine with
| leftists that hate Jews
|
| Basically if you block both left and right wing hatred
| and CP you're alone in the Fedi lmao
|
| The Fedi is like 4chan but worse, and normies think it's
| going to be better than Twitter even though it's worse in
| literally every aspect that they're upset about Twitter:
| petty censorship by server admins, horrible content, and
| identity verification are all -worse- on federated
| networks
| boyter wrote:
| What about the tech of Mastadon makes other nodes refuse
| to "federate with" me if I "federate with" something they
| don't like?
|
| Nothing. The blocking situation on the fediverse is
| arcane at best.
| shortformblog wrote:
| I just don't get how a newspaper with a freaking comments section
| doesn't understand the risk inherent with a social media website.
| If you break it down, a text-based comments section has many of
| the risks of a Mastodon server--people can share all manner of
| things. And worse, it's actually centralized.
|
| If everyone was as risk-averse as the FT comes off in this
| article, we would not have any creations of note.
| glass3 wrote:
| If everyone was as risk-averse, laws would be either much more
| lenient or the internet would flourish in other countries.
|
| I don't get why newspapers don't use Mastodon as a standard for
| their comment sections. Social networks are all about
| credibility. By moderating their users and requiring a fee,
| newspapers could become the service for credible accounts and
| reclaim the social network space from Facebook.
| shortformblog wrote:
| I absolutely agree. I have said that federated social media
| is a great opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle
| and _localize_ social media to some degree. The problem is
| that this is the mindset we're up against.
|
| Again, the newspaper assuredly did all the homework around
| building policies around moderating social media decades ago.
| They just aren't putting two and two together.
| gnz11 wrote:
| They know. Some editor saw the term "Mastadon" (or whatever
| other keywords) was trending and decided they needed to get
| some content up. Stuff like this is often content for the sake
| of content.
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