[HN Gopher] Mastodon is doomed?
___________________________________________________________________
Mastodon is doomed?
Author : bpierre
Score : 218 points
Date : 2023-04-26 14:09 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (justingarrison.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (justingarrison.com)
| duxup wrote:
| I don't care about the title.
|
| The opening of this article really applies to me. I don't want to
| manage a social network. I don't want to have to worry about the
| stability, politics, drama of the network I chose and so on...
|
| Moderation, even if imperfect, is a big selling point for me,
| even if I don't like to think about it being so.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| just go join mastodon.social then.
| masukomi wrote:
| > All of those "features" come with with a heavy price--
| responsibility. Running your own instance is increadibly time
| consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale.
|
| Huh. I didn't it difficult to understand how to click the "Buy
| Now" button on masto.host I spent about 5 minutes a month
| "running" it which is to say, responding to the maybe 1 request
| by my users to block an account / server.
|
| I spend less by letting him do it, and i don't have to deal with
| securing it or scaling it.
| criddell wrote:
| > With no income potential.
|
| Why is there no income potential? It seems to me that if Mastodon
| grows, there's lots of income potential.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I guess what he means is that the software itself doesn't
| provide any management for payment/subscription for access or
| features nor any advertising management.
| rvz wrote:
| > It seems to me that if Mastodon grows, there's lots of income
| potential.
|
| That is 7 years of "If", and all we get is instance takeovers,
| [0] where companies buy and own the users on multiple instances
| from the admins.
|
| If you are an admin with 1M registered users, you can sell them
| to the highest bidder. If you are a user, you get nothing.
|
| So much for the nonsense of _" Social networking that's not for
| sale"_ as a tag line.
|
| [0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-
| acquir...
| nologic01 wrote:
| Mastodon (both the software and the communities around it) is the
| first successful mammal in a world of dinosaurs.
|
| The challenges highlighted in the post feel generally true but
| the conclusion of it being doomed doesnt follow.
|
| What you have in the broader fediverse and its protocols is a
| alternative set of blueprints for building online interaction
| spaces. All transparent, open source and not predicated on
| obscene business models (gulping the planet's entirety of private
| data) in order to survive.
|
| Dinosaurs will continue roaming the digital Pangaea for a while
| but it is their gene pool that is doomed. They actually face all
| the same issues in essence, but are considerably less nimble in
| coming up with viable adaptations.
|
| Will people launching mastodon instances in vast numbers in five
| years? Will it be an elixir bonfire? Maybe a pythonic AI
| fediverse? I don't know what will evolve. But that meteor on the
| sky is harbinger of major changes coming up.
| lemiffe wrote:
| I had the same issue described in the article... how do you
| choose a community?
|
| It was the first question I had when looking into Mastodon, and a
| few minutes in I closed the tabs.
|
| I don't want to choose a community, I want a single place/domain
| I rely on, I don't care if the backend is decentralised, I want
| the entry as a new user to be as low as possible, I need to
| understand the product in a few sentences.
|
| They lost me as a potential user, I wonder how many more they
| lost. That entry barrier (just as with UX / registration forms)
| has to be as low as possible.
| xaduha wrote:
| If you think in these terms you're better off staying on
| Twitter and that's completely fine.
| websitejanitor wrote:
| Ordinary people will sign up for Bluesky instead of Mastodon.
| Removing friction is absolutely essential to growing a user
| base.
|
| Not everyone finds value in signaling how technical they are
| by overcoming/dealing with FOSS jank
| ahelwer wrote:
| If choosing one of several instances requires too high of
| activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem.
| You've circumscribed your own abilities to such an extent that
| it limits you to centralized for-profit social networks.
|
| > They lost me as a potential user
|
| Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually
| they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy. You're
| approaching mastodon with a customer mentality. This isn't a
| sale being made! Nobody is losing out on profiting off your
| time & attention! This is you choosing whether you want to keep
| feeding from the intentionally-insanity-causing trough of
| social networks that monetize attention.
| romwell wrote:
| >If choosing one of several instances requires too high of
| activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem.
|
| No it's not.
|
| The reasons why were outlined in the article, but I'll re-
| iterate them:
|
| 1. Choosing a community has long-lasting consequences for the
| user:
|
| -a: Losing an account due to server being unstable or unable
| to keep up with growth is a risk;
|
| -b: Choice of community determines the user's ability to
| communicate with other users, due to the community
| whitelist/blacklist nature of moderation. Join a "wrong"
| community, good luck being seen by anyone;
|
| 2. Choice of a server is supposed to reflect the _identity_
| of the user, and they will be treated differently _on the
| entire network_ depending on which community they join
|
| -a: The moderators of the instance you join can kick you off
| _the entire network_ for violating the rules of _that
| community_ , even if your activity is _elsewhere_ ;
|
| -b: In addition to other users not being able to _interact_
| with you at all if your instance is blacklisted by the admins
| of another instance, you will be judged by others depending
| on which instance you join - so you need to know what
| reputation the users of a community have on the network
| _before_ joining the network
|
| -c: Instance admins have _complete control over your account_
| , including the ability to read your messages and kick you
| off the network because of things you say in your
| communications, so the user needs to know _the reputation of
| the admins on the network_ before they join it
|
| >> They lost me as a potential user
|
| >Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually
| they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy.
|
| Oh right, why does a _social network_ need users for, after
| all?
|
| Are you kidding me? It _is_ a tragedy for a social network if
| nobody uses it.
|
| Social network users aren't just _customers_ - they are also
| _the product_ , part of the value proposition. Both in their
| identities and the content they create.
|
| Mastodon has far less to offer by design, so it's a no-go for
| me.
|
| You can say "oh what a tragedy", but I'm easily in the top 1%
| of users on reddit with nonzero karma by either post/comment
| karma/number of comments/amount of text typed; so people like
| me are what keeps a platform alive.
|
| Because we give others a reason to log in.
|
| And since choosing an instance effectively means _choosing an
| audience_ - yes, it _is_ a hurdle for _content creators in
| particular_ , and your dismissive attitude is an indicator
| that it's not an issue that is understood well by fans of the
| platform.
|
| Which is why it's doomed.
| yborg wrote:
| >Which is why it's doomed.
|
| Welp, time to get the T-shirts made. "Mastodon : Doomed
| Since 2016. No seriously, it's doomed."
| ahelwer wrote:
| Some people are fundamentally product-brained and fail to
| metabolize the concept of federated social media. That's
| fine, it's better without them.
|
| > You can say "oh what a tragedy", but I'm easily in the
| top 1% of users on reddit with nonzero karma by either
| post/comment karma/number of comments/amount of text typed;
| so people like me are what keeps a platform alive.
|
| I'm sorry but I audibly laughed when I read this.
|
| Mastodon is where you go to hang out with friends,
| colleagues, and fellow hobbyists. You go there to have a
| good time and learn from others. People obsessed with
| building their personal brand or audience or upvote score
| embody much of what people hate about other forms of social
| media. The platform is much improved without them.
| tedivm wrote:
| I'm all for valid criticism, but this read more like a rant (a
| rather long one at that). I think it's interesting that they used
| hachyderm as an example of why things don't scale, when that
| organization has managed to build a robust platform and nonprofit
| based off of user contributions.
| kornhole wrote:
| So many people are saying that picking an instance is just too
| difficult. Let's just create a random picker like a Roulette
| wheel of all open instances for those people. Moving instances
| later is easy.
| skee8383 wrote:
| "The reality is people don't want to pick their favorite
| community, running an instance is expensive and complicated, and
| owning your data isn't a product feature."
|
| This is the problem that affects all federated/decentralized
| projects. Same thing with Urbit. No one wants to keep their
| computer running 24/7 to support a network. and no one wants to
| bare the financial burden of paying for a server to host a
| community.
| superkuh wrote:
| There's no way to read a mastadon post without executing
| javascript. There's not even a proxy like "nitter" is for twitter
| to view posts as HTML. The "best" way is to read the entire feed
| of a user by requesting it as json and parsing that with your
| eyes. It's a terrible user experience. I mostly just ignore
| mastadon servers post version 3.
| bhouston wrote:
| Mastodon is doing fine. It is vibrant with a ton of activity.
|
| Mastodon could be more efficient. I think there must be problems
| in their implementation. I think it needs a core rewrite.
|
| I think of the current infrastructure of Mastodon as like old
| Atom editor. Remember it?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor). It was super
| extensible and ran on Electron, but it was slow and somewhat
| unstable.
|
| Then VSCode come around with much of the same benefits but it was
| fast and stable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code
|
| Before VSCode rose to prominent, many people would claim that an
| Electron-based editor would never work and point to the problems
| Atom had. But the issue was more specific to Atom and not just
| inherent in the general idea.
|
| We need the VSCode version of Mastodon so it can discard the
| inefficiencies that it currently has and scale to the
| opportunity.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| If the blogpost were talking about a forest, they would be
| saying that the soil isn't fertile enough for proper forest
| growth, and you would be talking about rewriting the tree's
| DNA.
| bhouston wrote:
| Maybe but the first party mastodon iOS client pails in
| comparison to the more professional offerings. I suspect the
| mastodon server would similarly pop in comparison to a more
| professional rewrite.
|
| Remember they switched out the core engine of mongo as well
| (wild tiger) and then it became a lot less of a joke.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| You're not getting it. Would rewriting MySpace or Google+
| have made those things succeed? No, because speed was not
| the main issue.
| codemac wrote:
| I think.. this argument is weak.
|
| The more comparable example is whether or not BTC could replace
| USD for day-to-day transactions. The answer is basically no, it
| cannot. It can only process 7/second, due to how it works.
| Thus, BTC will never become the daily transaction
| infrastructure
|
| Mastodon is similar. It will have severe scaling issues, as it
| makes simple operations far far more complex to get federated
| features that are more social than things like email. Just like
| crypto shenanigans, basically additional infrastructure will
| need to be built.
| timeon wrote:
| > it was fast and stable
|
| There is no huge difference between Atom and VSCode. I was
| using Atom. It worked. It was popular. But Microsoft could
| afford bigger momentum - and took it. Then I used VSCode. I
| have noticed difference in speed only after I switched to
| Sublime Text.
| bhouston wrote:
| I think you were not around when Atom was new? Being slow and
| unstable was a very common complaint and at the time the main
| solution was to switch to VSCode once it existed. Here is
| some old reddit threads at the time that reflects the mood
| very accurately:
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Atom/comments/58nkn3/any_way_to_spe.
| ..
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Atom/comments/2i2xs6/atom_is_a_real.
| ..
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Atom/comments/7dfozc/why_is_atom_so.
| ..
|
| Even GitHub issues on Atom about it:
| https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10188
|
| This is the reason why VSCode beat Atom, even though Atom I
| think was released first.
| lakomen wrote:
| It's a censorship dystopia with rampant cancel culture. Nothing
| is fine
| bhouston wrote:
| Run your own server and talk about anything you want. It is
| up to others to want to also talk to you.
| jszymborski wrote:
| There are plenty of sustainable Mastodon instances that are run
| by a cooperative of users. Social.coop has been running for ages
| and is very active. Members pay a pay-what-you-can fee to join
| the member-run coop. It works super well, and they always have a
| surplus they're looking to reinvest.
|
| I'm on a canadian coop instance that launched a few months ago
| (@jszym@cosocial.ca). If you're a cannuck, consider joining!
| dgellow wrote:
| I don't want to hijack a mastodon thread for an alternative, but
| because it is invite-only and still very new if people here want
| to try out Bluesky, send me an email at: sam at elborai me. I
| just got a whole bunch of invite codes and I'm happy sharing them
| with fellow HNers.
|
| It's late in my time zone, so don't expect a response before
| 8-10h, but I read all my emails in the morning.
| albertkinng wrote:
| [flagged]
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| That's a silly take. It all comes from the perspective that
| Mastodon has to be the next big thing. This is BS. It can stay
| small and serve those who choose to use it.
| lakomen wrote:
| Hachyderm.io is operated by an Ukrainian Faschist who censors any
| truthful comments and bans people because of that on 1st
| occurrence.
|
| I ran my own instance and deleted it after 3 months. No one wants
| to accept you as a relay. The only one who did accept was
| Beckmeyer, good guy. But it had week long outages. Searching
| Mastodon posts is impossible. There's a very strong cancel
| culture on Mastodon instances. The main players control who can
| and can speak freely.
|
| It's all even more fucked up than Facebook and Twitter.
|
| Add to that PITA upgrade procedures, and a 500 char limit per
| post, which includes hashtags.
|
| Absolutely ridiculous how this pos software made it so far.
| pornel wrote:
| Their policies seem good. It looks like you've broken their
| rules, got banned, and you're continuing to be a dick about it.
|
| https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/moderation/covenant/
|
| Also please note that fascism is a specific ideology, not
| merely a description for everyone who doesn't want you in their
| community.
| kernal wrote:
| I can't help but draw parallels to Mastodon and the Year of Linux
| on the desktop. There was no way Mastodon was ever going to
| succeed due to the network effects.
| weavie wrote:
| What is the biggest resource bottleneck in Mastodon?
|
| Like, are the certain design decisions that could be optimised to
| make it more resource efficient? Is it just because it is written
| in Ruby? Is there something inherent to ActivityPub that means it
| has to use a lot of resources? Can work be done to make it
| cheaper to run?
| simonw wrote:
| ActivityPub involves a HUGE number of HTTP requests. Every time
| you create a post your server has to deliver that post via HTTP
| to every other instance that has at least one of your followers
| - this can quickly grow to hundreds of deliveries if you have a
| few thousand followers.
|
| Mastodon uses a Sidekiq queue and Ruby threads to handle these
| deliveries.
|
| I have a strong hunch that switching to delivery through a more
| efficient mechanism - async IO, or a lower level language -
| could have a big impact there.
|
| My web browser doesn't blink at loading 100 resources to render
| a web page, so delivering a few hundred HTTP requests shouldn't
| be impossibly hard to scale, even when you take retries into
| account.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and
| difficult to understand how to secure and scale.
|
| I mean, sure, maybe, if you're running the huge and clunky
| Mastodon source. Akkoma is much easier. GotoSocial is even easier
| again. Honk, assuming you don't need MastoAPI support, is even
| easier still since it comes bundled with its own UI.
|
| It'd be easier to take the article seriously if it wasn't
| blinkered from the get-go.
| mberlove wrote:
| Probably like a number of users here, I used mastodon "before it
| was cool" -- and it was never in reality an "alt twitter", it was
| _its own_ microblogging service, with niche communities, and with
| its own set of pros and cons.
|
| IMHO the hopes of an influx of users to _make_ it the next
| Twitter doesn 't change the fundament of what Mastodon
| represents.
|
| The author's statement that Mastodon's CEO has "no plans for
| monotization [sic]" does not, in my take, reduce the benefits of
| open-source & federated communities one iota.
| sdfghswe wrote:
| Mastodon's is decentralized, why would you monotize it?
| prmoustache wrote:
| The biggest struggle to me for admins will be spam management.
| timmb wrote:
| I feel the real problem with Mastodon is that there's no way to
| reclaim an identity if a server goes down. The idea of a
| fediverse is to be robust against instances collapsing, but it
| seems the only way to move server is to leave a pointer on the
| old server.
|
| Instead, you could put a public key on your profile and keep a
| local backup of your data and private key. Then if your instance
| dies or you get booted out (there will always be tyrants and
| schizms) you can still set up shop somewhere else and ping your
| old followers with a signed message.
|
| Right now it's like a city with a lot of bars which is great
| except you can't leave and go to a different one with the same
| face.
| throwaway689236 wrote:
| Nostr solves this problem, your identity is defined by a
| private+public key pair, you own your account and history
| instead of the node admin.
| basscomm wrote:
| > I feel the real problem with Mastodon is that there's no way
| to reclaim an identity if a server goes down. The idea of a
| fediverse is to be robust against instances collapsing, but it
| seems the only way to move server is to leave a pointer on the
| old server.
|
| Email has the same problem, but is it really a problem?
| funOtter wrote:
| I think that you're describing Nostr.
| gnramires wrote:
| I think there's a point in particular that's not true:
|
| > If the instance you're on is compromised you will lose your
| identity because private keys are stored as part of the instance.
| No private keys, no identity, no portability.
|
| I don't think it's quite so bad, although of course a server
| vulnerability is bad: you can have an email account as a backup.
| That's the way many services have kept secure: you can invalidate
| the old password after a breach and email users a new one. In the
| worst case, you could try to prove to moderators you're really
| the account owner. However, the most important point is that it's
| just an account: you can just create a new one, and be mostly
| fine (after letting people know you've moved). In the case of the
| breach mentioned before, a notice could be left on inactive post-
| breach accounts.
|
| There's not really too much data you'd care about that isn't
| public already, and you can do regular backups in case there is
| (private messages, I guess?). It might be nice to add some auto
| backup functionality to some cloud service I guess.
| fabiofzero wrote:
| VCs hate Mastodon (actually the federation) because they can't
| control it. Hence this post. Nothing to see here.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| It seems like most Twitter power users who prioritize easy setup,
| UX, and audience access, and who don't really care about
| federation, are migrating to Substack Notes.
| xwdv wrote:
| For me the decision of having to choose a server always made
| Mastodon a non-starter for me. Just requires too much activation
| energy to even get started.
| kornhole wrote:
| It is about freedom and choice. If you don't want that or are
| unable, there are plenty of platforms that make the choices for
| you.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| Yall are looking at this the wrong way.
|
| Mastadon is a bad Twitter replacement. But with a few tweaks, it
| is a good Discord and Telegram replacement. The inevitable
| Discord/Telegram monetization squeeze is going to be a huge event
| for Mastadon.
| artificial wrote:
| How much do you pay for Mastadon? How much does it cost to
| host?
| cdelsolar wrote:
| [flagged]
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| For a big former Discord group? Probably a lot.
|
| But many Discord (and some Telegram) admins already self host
| auxiliary stuff and solicit community donations for funding.
| TBH they would probably _like_ running their own instance as
| a hobby.
| kornhole wrote:
| Running your own instance is not difficult. I recommend
| installing Yunohost.org on a $5/month VPS or some hardware you
| have laying around such as a single board computer. Installing
| apps from the Yunohost catalog is like installing from an app
| store. You can try different apps like Akkoma, Mastodon, Calckey,
| and others until you find the one you like. Then Yunohost makes
| maintenance and upgrade easy thank to the community of people
| maintaining the scripts that do everything behind the scenes.
| neallindsay wrote:
| I clicked through expecting to see a blog post from six years
| ago, but according to the timestamp this post is only a couple of
| days old.
| Lolaccount wrote:
| My n=1 experience has been far better using Mastodon than
| twitter.
|
| I used to check the Twitter Explore page without logging in, just
| see what was going down. But now that they've 'bodged' that up
| too, they've released me from any reason to go back. Thank you,
| Elon.
|
| It's a relief to encounter generally "real" and/or "interesting"
| people (who are the kind of people to persist on Mastodon)
| instead of political mudslingers, blue check twitter maximalists,
| Elon d riders, etc.
|
| Just a better experience all around.
|
| Mastodon feels a bit like the old bulletin boards used to feel
| like - "just over there dealing with its own niche in a calm and
| kind of fun way ... not the centre of the universe or trying to
| be this or that...".
|
| And I'm thankful for it.
| TrevorFSmith wrote:
| A useless generalization like "people don't want this" is a great
| example of why there's room in the world for a federated network
| of small instances. Humanity is not the Borg. The folks who
| obviously do want something different than a centralized network
| run for profit can go on happily using federations while people
| who want a new Twitter with a new board of directors calling the
| shots can go use one of those. It's ok for both to exist and to
| serve different purposes. Really.
| senko wrote:
| I don't know. I'm happy paying $12/yr ($1/mo) for an account. If
| operation costs are half that, a few thousand users can make a
| nice side gig hosting this.
|
| Why does everything need to scale exponentially or it is doomed?
| Federation avoids the "winner take all" trap.
|
| I don't know if Mastodon is going to grow or if something else
| (Bluesky?) will replace it, or if we'll just all stay on Twitter.
|
| But it doesn't seem to me like it's doomed.
| nemo44x wrote:
| It's funny watching all this because we had all this in the 90's
| and early 2k's and went away from it for a reason. Anyone
| remember Hotline or Caracho? These were client/server/tracker
| software for federated communities. If you wanted to host a
| server which had chat, messaging, forum, files, etc you'd
| download the server software and run on your computer using
| something like DYNDNS to keep your host address static. You'd
| register with a tracker so that others could find you. Trackers
| could ban servers they didn't like by not listing them. People
| running client software would connect to a tracker to get a list
| of servers and connect to them if allowed. The server operator
| could have a free for all or create privileged accounts. It was
| great.
|
| But it can't scale and it's too complex for most people. People
| left these types of networks for Facebook, Twitter, etc.
|
| Going back to this, or a variation of it, is simply regressive.
| It's the wrong direction.
| mg wrote:
| I don't know enough about ActivityPub to be sure, but it seems
| that the "push" format is the problem?
|
| If user U1 on server C1 subscribes to user U2 on server C2, does
| that mean when U2 posts, C2 sends the post to C1, independent of
| wether U1 is online or not?
|
| If C1 can only request the updates while U1 is online, then the
| Fediverse should scale just like RSS.
|
| I never heard anybody saying that RSS is doomed because of
| scaling issues.
| mariusor wrote:
| > the "push" format is the problem
|
| I mean it only worked for email since the dawn of the internet.
| :P
|
| But ActivityPub has no concept of "online" for actors, the
| activities that have an actor in their recipients list will end
| up in their inbox no matter what.
| rektide wrote:
| The same net quantity of data would likely be sent so I'm not
| sure what the advantage would be.
|
| There's be some savings from users just never signing in &
| never pulling. But also, server c2 also has hundreds or
| thousands of other users too. If any of those subscribe to u1,
| that traffic would have been sent either way.
|
| So the hypothetical unread messages advantage of pull rapidly
| erodes at any kind of scale. I'm not sure what the gain might
| be.
|
| One nice thing about rss is that it's relatively cacheable.
| CDNs are well optimized. Honestly I think it's mostly just bad
| implementations, that figuring out what messages to pushing
| data out ought be fairly optimizable & not terrible to scale
| out effectively. But being efficient & smart about it does take
| some though.
| withinrafael wrote:
| > If mastodon is to be the poster child of the fediverse it needs
| to drastically simplify the requirements to run and maintain an
| instance.
|
| Completely agree.
|
| I tried to self-host Cloudflare's Wildebeest as part of the "own
| your own identity and content" dream and it was a complete
| disaster. It's an incomplete amalgamation of alpha-quality and
| production Cloudflare services and code with no real roadmap. It
| doesn't install properly out of the box using their own
| documentation and most clients will try to use some
| Mastodon/ActivityPub API that isn't implemented and fail. So
| unless you're looking to seriously hack on its codebase, I'd
| recommend staying away for a few years.
| huslage wrote:
| Whataboutism is a powerful drug.
| johnklos wrote:
| All of those "features" come with with a heavy price--
| responsibility. Running your own instance is increadibly time
| consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale. It
| also can be quite expensive if it grows to any meaningful amount
| of use.
|
| I think it's important to note, which I think the article fails
| to do, that this isn't a problem with other Fediverse software,
| but something unique to Mastodon:
|
| 1) Ruby on Rails is, well, bad. It was in the past, but I hoped
| things had changed. I tried running Mastodon, and in the two
| weeks I was playing with it late last year there were two
| dependency updates which broke Mastodon, until Mastodon was
| updated. It's untenable, and it certainly adds to the idea that
| running your own is "increadibly time consuming", if you have to
| worry about breaking things any time any dependency gets updated.
|
| 2) The failure of Ruby on Rails leads to insecurity. Most people
| don't update because of #1 and just let things run. This is all
| fine and dandy until there are real security issues, at which
| time people sometimes panic, update and break things, or there's
| a compromise.
|
| 3) Mastodon (and Ruby on Rails) isn't performant. A decent modern
| server, particularly one that could be bought for $5,000, should
| easily be able to handle 30,000 users, if one were to extrapolate
| from some of the articles written about Fediverse hosting... But
| the articles showing very good performance aren't about Mastodon.
| Some specifically talk about migrating to other software because
| of Mastodon performance.
|
| So is it time consuming? Yes, because it's slow, breaks easily
| and doesn't scale well. I think it's demonstrably true that other
| software (Pleroma, for example, or Akkoma for those of us who
| aren't fans of the Pleroma admins) is faster (and therefore
| scales much better), isn't remotely as fragile (and therefore can
| be kept up to date and secured with ease), and less time
| consuming (most updates take literally a minute or two).
|
| Perhaps the author should consider the idea that the failure of
| Mastodon is not the same thing as the failure of the Fediverse
| precisely because other options exist.
| wnevets wrote:
| From what I can tell developers and the infosec community moved
| to mastodon, that's good enough for me. I don't have to everyone
| on the planet using the same social media service for me to use
| it.
| dickhardt wrote:
| The OP conflates the fediverse with Mastodon, and my
| understanding of his key point is that it is doomed because
| Mastodon is complicated to run. As the operator of
| https://press.coop, I agree. Mastodon is 10 yr old web tech (Ruby
| on Rails with Postgres) that does not take advantage of modern
| cloud architectures. (The streaming service is written in nodejs
| and is efficient and just works)
|
| But software continues to evolve. There are numerous other
| software projects on the fediverse, Cloudflare's Wildebeest being
| an example of a more efficient, and easier to manage
| implementation. Crowdfunding has become a common means for
| instances to be funded. It is still early days for the fediverse,
| and the pace of innovation continues to accelerate. Remember that
| Twitter was twttr when it launched, and was an SMS based app.
| Flickr was a Flash app.
| drivebyops wrote:
| Substack is the real 2008 Twitter alternative, having more people
| in a platform is a anti-feature
| rg111 wrote:
| > Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn
| diagrams of lots of communities and interests. Selecting a
| username can be difficult, deciding which community you want as
| part of your identity--even if you can change it--is too much.
| The act of choosing a server has kept more than a few people away
| from Mastodon.
|
| I don't want people to be Venn diagrams. I want communities to be
| a Venn diagram. Like subreddits, or FB Groups, or Discord
| servers.
|
| I have always been a person with many interests. And Mastodon
| doesn't cut it for me.
|
| The way I find new reddit subs in comments or come to know about
| new FB groups from friends- is missing in Mastodon.
|
| Why should I must _choose_ among Open Source, Math and Machine
| Learning? I like all of them. I should be able to see posts from
| all communities on a single feed.
|
| It is also not as Twitter or Instagram. Where everything is
| people centric but you get suggestions and shares from different
| interest groups.
| mcv wrote:
| I don't know about Mastodon, but Friendica has been a smashing
| success from my perspective. My feed is full of interesting
| people, many of whom are on Mastodon. It doesn't have to be for
| everybody; it's pretty good the way it is.
|
| That said, I think a Fediverse account should be standard with an
| ISP account just like email. Pay your ISP to maintain the server
| just like they maintain everything else you already you already
| use. And if you use your account for threats and harassment, your
| ISP knows who you are.
| rvz wrote:
| It appears that the official Mastodon app has crowned
| 'mastodon.social' as the default on the official Mastodon app.
| [0] So it has been admitted that asking the user to 'choose a
| server' was a disastrous thing to do for adoption which confuses
| the user from the start.
|
| Hence this 'default' it also means the centralization of
| mastodon.social will accelerate, federation never mattered in the
| first place and risking the same problem that happened with
| pawoo.net, mstdn.jp and and mastodon.cloud all acquired under one
| company. [0] So the bigger you get, the bigger you are as a
| takeover target.
|
| If the instance is too small, will risk getting DDoSed very
| easily and won't be able to handle an influx of new users and
| would have to close signups. If it is too big, it risks not being
| able to scale and needs to re-centralize with Cloudflare and the
| instance will receive lots of take over attempts from those with
| deep pockets.
|
| Eventually, the owners will cave in. Just like they did with a
| 'default' instance.
|
| Do not tell me that you will reject someone willing to take over
| an instance with lots of users for hundreds of millions of
| dollars.
|
| [0] https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677
|
| [1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-
| acquir...
| nrvn wrote:
| > Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and
| difficult to understand how to secure and scale.
|
| Tell this to phpbb/vbulletin/whatever forum admins. A huge chunk
| of those forums have been up and alive for 20 years and more.
| Yes, they are probably not super secure, do not support
| horizontal autoscaling and are not replicated across multiple
| datacenters. But who cares if they work and give the sense of
| community?..
|
| Another example would be jabber/xmpp servers. Btw, google chat
| and facebook messenger were xmpp-based meaning you could chat
| with anyone outside of then-not-so-walled gardens. But this is a
| completely different story.
| transfire wrote:
| One of the reasons we need faster upload speeds, so people can
| host from home.
| JustSomeNobody wrote:
| CGNAT needs to die as well.
| mvanbaak wrote:
| THIS!
| zirgs wrote:
| Many ISPs forbid web hosting from home.
| poulpy123 wrote:
| except that nobody wants to host its own server, just a
| minority of minority of geeks
| duxup wrote:
| This seems pretty wild to me that for say a social network I
| need fast upload speeds.
| [deleted]
| turnsout wrote:
| Once you implement a basic ActivityPub server, you realize
| you're basically asking for a friendly DDoS. If you toot a
| photo to 1000 followers, your server needs to blast it out to
| every unique instance in that list of 1000, then ask for
| whatever updates _they_ have. It 's not "efficient," but the
| upside is that it's conceptually very simple.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > If you toot a photo to 1000 followers, your server needs
| to blast it out to every unique instance in that list of
| 1000
|
| I might be misunderstanding here but if you make a status
| with a photo, it doesn't attach the literal bytes of the
| photo but the URL to your local copy of the photo which
| may, admittedly, by fetched 1000 times by those instances
| if someone on each of those instances looks at it.
|
| cf https://octodon.social/@pzmyers/110265584018863694 which
| has the link //assets.octodon.social/media_attachments/file
| s/110/265/581/155/000/717/original/0b24824d56920b79.jpeg
| and also a preview link of https://assets.octodon.social/me
| dia_attachments/files/110/26....
| turnsout wrote:
| Unfortunately, what happens is that (for some reason),
| instances cache remote media. So if I'm on rando.zyx, it
| will download and cache the image from octodon.social for
| local rando.zyx users.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Which is a very different situation to "blast out the
| photo to 1000 instances".
|
| But even then, not all of them fetch and cache media on
| receipt of a status (e.g. mine don't) and they're not
| fetching them at the same time according to my logs.
|
| You may well still end up serving 1000 copies of the
| photo (or even more if people aren't caching) but it's
| 100% not "blast out the photo to 1000 instances when you
| post" - it's much gentler.
| KomoD wrote:
| It's not just images either, it's the same with link
| previews, so any link that gets posted will get visited
| by the instances your instance is federated with.
|
| Small example log: https://pastebin.com/raw/jYZ1z8dG
|
| I've seen some cases where there's been 1000+ requests to
| a site just because a link to it was posted.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| Now that is a problem. But people have suggested workable
| solutions and hopefully at some point, the Mastodon
| authors will pull their heads out of their hole and get
| on with implementing something. I wouldn't hold my
| breath, mind.
| KomoD wrote:
| Earlier today I posted a link to a video on my webserver,
| all the instances hammered me so hard it maxed out my
| 1gbps connection
| zimpenfish wrote:
| It's been an issue since 2017[1] (since moved to [2]) but
| the discussion always devolves into "but what if someone
| LIES in the federated preview??!!?!" bikeshedding.
|
| [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486
|
| [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662
| bee_rider wrote:
| It is a funny that from our point of view, sending out to
| the internet has one flat cost. Most of my friends (people
| who would be interested in my photos) live in the same
| state as me. A bunch live in the same or adjacent towns...
| afavour wrote:
| Home upload speeds aren't holding that back. Hardware is.
|
| What is the average social media user going to host their
| Mastodon instance on? I wish it were possible to run mini-
| servers on something like an Apple TV, goodness knows there's
| enough CPU going spare there most of the time. Or that ISPs
| shipped routers capable of it. But alas most people don't have
| sufficiently open hardware just sitting around at home.
| kornhole wrote:
| Run Yunohost on any SBC or old laptop you have laying around.
| That is what I do.
| porkbeer wrote:
| My upload speeds, that I pay 120/mo for, are under 300kb.
| Boradband in america is largely a joke. I have only one
| provider in my area under 200/mo.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > What is the average social media user going to host their
| Mastodon instance on?
|
| A Raspberry Pi?
|
| https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi
|
| (Sadly no AkkomaPi yet, it seems.)
| afavour wrote:
| I love the idea of it. The average user is never going to
| do it.
|
| > Unzip the image and install it to an SD card
|
| OK, you'll lose some people here but a lot could handle
| that
|
| > Configure your WiFi by editing pleromapi-wpa-
| supplicant.txt
|
| Aaand they're gone
| simonw wrote:
| Bit of a weird post.
|
| "All of the 3rd party integrations are happening with
| ActivityPub, not Mastodon."
|
| That right there is the solution to most of the author's
| complaints!
|
| I for one would be completely satisfied with this outcome: I
| don't care about Mastodon, I care about the Fediverse concept
| generally.
|
| Mainly I want a way of publishing and consuming short-form
| content that's immune from being bought and ruined by a
| capricious billionaire.
| al2o3cr wrote:
| If you don't know what PgBouncer or Sidkiq are in 2023 I
| wouldn't invest a ton of time in learning them now.
|
| Yeah, who needs those proven tools? I'm sure Justin can suggest
| you an AWS alternative that'll 100% lock you in and then go
| directly from "beta" to "unsupported legacy" after you adopt it.
| Have fun! /s
| sanity31415 wrote:
| What we need is a common platform, an operating system for
| building interoperable and scalable decentralized services. This
| is exactly what we're building with https://docs.freenet.org/.
| rsynnott wrote:
| > It's only a matter of time until there will be a CVE found in
| the official Mastodon software which will leave a vast majority
| of instances vulnerable
|
| It's only a matter of, er, four years ago, in fact:
| https://www.cvedetails.com/product/59775/Joinmastodon-Mastod...
|
| Also, by this reasoning, Wordpress is doomed; at peak Wordpress
| averaged about one CVE _per week_. And yet Wordpress remains
| stubbornly ubiquitous...
| turnsout wrote:
| The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for
| Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might
| be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of
| people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc.
|
| We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic centralized
| social media platforms, but if we peek over our recency bias, we
| can see that it wasn't always that way.
| romwell wrote:
| >The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for
| Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We
| might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large
| chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky,
| etc.
|
| Did you read the article? It's right there in the end:
|
| >Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have
| lots of happy users. I'm greatful for the admins that have
| dedicated so much of their time running instances, and thank
| you to the admins who shared their instance financial
| information.
|
| >If you love Mastodon I'm happy for you. The internet needs
| bold bets and people to invest in them.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| The one key advantage centralized social/messaging has is spam
| control. Of course that's because spam is unrealized and
| unregulated advertising revenue that the platform doesn't
| control.
|
| How does Mastodon prevent itself from becoming email? I'm
| unfamiliar with the design. Do you simply turtle your trust
| with other servers?
|
| One of the interesting things I haven't seen with advanced AI
| is the antispam AI. I would love to have a semi-trustable
| service that reviewed incoming numbers/messages and evaluated
| them against expert level manipulation, propaganda,
| advertising, and con techniques. Of course that then provides
| access to the agent ...
|
| You'd THINK facebook and google have advanced AI language
| models for these given ChatGPT's abilities, but I've never seen
| or heard anything like that. Then again, that would be customer
| focused, and google and facebook are now more spam/con than
| pro-consumer utility.
|
| Ha, if ChatGPT is REALLY converging to the point of coding
| actual systems (1-2 years maybe???), then I would like to
| weaponize it to counter the api drift defense used by the
| social media walled gardens.
|
| No one has been able to truly integrate your social media
| content across the walls. Because no integration stands the
| constant drift of api interface. BUT, if chatgpt can constantly
| adapt to the changes, you might be able to do it.
|
| Consider that while the walled gardens can shift their APIs to
| some degree, they can't shift them REALLY fast, because their
| "actual" partners need some stability. So I might be able to AI
| adapt-scrape from my sources and centralize better.
|
| I don't think that is within ChatGPT's current abilities, but I
| don't think it is that far.
|
| "Turtling" : a defensive, cautious approach to expansion in RTS
| and 4X games, rather than reckless expansion and "mixing it
| up". In this context, you carefully whitelist nodes
| conservatively, but you'll miss a lot of content and people.
| tpm wrote:
| > Do you simply turtle your trust with other servers?
|
| Not sure what turtle means in this case, but spam is
| currently less of a problem on mastodon (mastodon.world is
| the instance I'm using) than on twitter. When the admins
| actually care, they can solve it.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I might be wrong, but I think you can't see anything from
| anybody you're not following (e.g. if anybody spams your
| timeline, just unfollow).
| tpm wrote:
| They can spam your posts with replies. Haven't seen that
| yet though. Then it's up to the instance admins.
| 98codes wrote:
| And as someone that's recently left Twitter behind where that
| would've been unthinkable a year ago -- it's clearer than ever
| to me now that none of it matters. If I were to lose everything
| on Mastodon tomorrow, oh well.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| But the whole appeal of social networks is that _everyone_ is
| there. No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20
| slightly different groups of people, or to follow 20 different
| celebrities they like.
|
| There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving
| small social network.
| romwell wrote:
| >There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving
| small social network.
|
| You are saying this on _Hackernews_ , out of all places...
| which is an example of one.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| Those social networks are all sitting on top of the same
| internet, and _everybody_ is on the internet (e.g. there 's
| no reason why different social networks shouldn't be able to
| integrate with each other).
|
| (I shudder in horror to think what email would look like if
| it was invented today by some Silicon Valley techbro startup
| - interoperability somehow isn't even considered as an option
| anymore)
| mejutoco wrote:
| Everyone has email, but not everyone is on gmail, for
| instance.
| textfiles wrote:
| Admin/Veteran of small social networks over the last 30 years
| here. Yes there are.
| turnsout wrote:
| Definitely--there are so many thriving fora that were
| around before Facebook, and will be full of activity long
| after Meta has been delisted.
| femiagbabiaka wrote:
| There's this thing called IRC...
| izzydata wrote:
| That is then opposite of what I find appealing. Every
| community I have ever been a part of on the internet has only
| gotten worse and eventually unacceptably bad by growing too
| large.
|
| I also don't like the convergence of online identifies with
| real identifies in communities which also tends to ruin the
| point of an online community for me.
|
| So having different groups for different purposes is
| precisely what I do want and having every human on Earth on
| one platform is the exact opposite of what I would want.
| pixl97 wrote:
| By growing large you attract predators and parasites, you
| must pay a very high price in moderation to removing this
| spam and trolling. An individual/small group of individuals
| fighting against every bad actor on the planet. By staying
| smaller you are more likely to fall under a 'dark forest'.
| You'll still be attacked by your local level trolls, but
| the likelihood you'll be attacked worldwide is lessened.
| xoac wrote:
| Nope it's a side-effect of the current business model which
| is to monetize attention at the biggest scale possible.
| outime wrote:
| It may be the whole appeal for you but for others it's a
| deterrent.
| naravara wrote:
| > But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is
| there. No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20
| slightly different groups of people, or to follow 20
| different celebrities they like.
|
| The nice thing about a federated system is that it's ONE app
| to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people.
| eropple wrote:
| _> There 's never really going to be such a thing as a
| thriving small social network._
|
| Just because you're not on them doesn't mean they don't
| exist.
|
| I wouldn't namedrop the ones I like here because I like them
| the way they are, but consider: there are _so many_ 100-200
| member Discords with consistent and vibrant communities.
|
| They're not trying to become hypermassive cash engines, but
| that's okay and even good. That's a grim way to exist.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > there are so many 100-200 member Discords with consistent
| and vibrant communities
|
| Slack has a free tier too.
|
| 90-days of history only, is as much a feature as it is a
| bug. Idle "off-the record" talk with current and/or ex
| colleagues in a bar after work isn't recorded indefinitely,
| why should the online equivalent?
| beardog wrote:
| To have actual off the record, you need disappearing
| messages (and trust for your colleagues) like in Signal.
| Not simply paywalled messages.
| cal85 wrote:
| I know the small ones exist, and I use many, they're often
| much better than Twitter for specialist interests (HN is
| just one example). But I also scroll through Twitter daily,
| for something the small ones can't provide: it's the big
| one where 'everyone' is.
| berkes wrote:
| > No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20
| slightly different groups of people
|
| Then why do we have Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube,
| Orkut, Whatsapp, Instagram, SnapChat, QQ, Facebook,
| Hackernews, Discord, and Stackoverflow?
|
| What you say people don't want, is exactly what people
| already do.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Because the medium is different. Instagram is different
| images, twitter is text, Fb is more local social circle.
| But if you have 5 twitter clones, no one wants to use 5
| mcv wrote:
| The thing is, Fediverse could be all of those things.
| There's an Instagram clone, there's a YouTube clone,
| there's Mastodon that's similar to Twitter, and Friendica
| that's more like Facebook. And you can follow them all
| from a single account if you want.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| They could but hard to compete on content
| mcv wrote:
| YouTube is the big one there. But you can still share
| YouTube content on the Fediverse.
| krapp wrote:
| You're literally describing the way forums, messageboards,
| mailing lists and _everything_ worked before Twitter and
| Facebook came along. Yes, people can and will handle more
| than the absolute minimum social complexity just fine.
|
| And Mastodon in particular will let you follow people on
| whatever instance you happen to use. "Checking 20 different
| apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people" is
| hyperbole, not reality.
| jghn wrote:
| > You're literally describing the way forums,
| messageboards, mailing lists and everything worked before
| Twitter and Facebook came along
|
| Yes. And while the GP was hyberbolic, I think what we saw
| is that a large %age of people preferred one stop shopping.
|
| Speaking for myself, the thing I love(d) the most about
| Twitter was the consolidation. It effectively replaced a
| bunch of message boards, online sites, and other things I
| would check throughout the day. One site gave me banter
| with friends, talking shop with professional acquaintances,
| weather, news, gossip, etc.
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| The people who were first online didn't represent the
| average person. Everyone's online now, it used to be a
| bunch of geeks and weirdos back then. I'm nostalgic as well
| but the times have changed.
| giantrobot wrote:
| This is very ahistorical. There's long been consumer non-
| geek friendly online services. The typical AOL user in
| the 90s wasn't a geek by any means. They used chat rooms,
| instant messaging, and mailing lists via the user
| friendly AOL interface.
|
| Facebook has long provided a user-friendly interface for
| non-geek users. It's filled with non-geeks generating
| content.
|
| While the Internet has always had a geek contingent it
| hasn't been the exclusive domain of geeks for nearly
| thirty years.
| lamontcg wrote:
| > But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is
| there.
|
| literally posting this to the HN audience...
| soneil wrote:
| In the real world, I have a network of colleagues at work. a
| network of friends at home. two separate networks that
| revolve around specific hobbies and rarely collide with the
| others. And when I go home, I have a latent network of
| friends & family.
|
| And there's absolutely no reason for any of these networks to
| cross paths. The idea that everyone needs to be in one
| network, is just as logical as my mother reading my HN
| comments.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I talk to my close friends by text, discord, and steam chat.
| I talk to my coworkers by LinkedIn and slack. I talk to my
| family by phone, email, and text. Some are on signal some are
| not.
|
| It's quite normal.
| IanCal wrote:
| > There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving
| small social network.
|
| Fun to see this posted on a pretty niche but very active site
| which covers probably a small proportion of your social
| circle.
| stcroixx wrote:
| Many people want just that, but there is likely no overlap
| between them and someone following celebrities on social
| media.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I would note that you are writing this on a thriving small
| social network.
| epolanski wrote:
| The appeal of reddit and tik tok is the content, not the fact
| that everyone is here.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The realit is no such network that can brag that everyone is
| there. The biggest one, Facebook, doesn't even have a third
| of the total population on earth as active users.
|
| Twitter, that we all love to talk about, has only a very
| small penetration with around 200 millions of active users.
|
| And there are still myriads of tiny web forums with very
| active communities. I don't think every social network needs
| to have a global penetration.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Let's add that twitter has/had peaks up to the billion
| concurrent users scale during important global events.
| prmoustache wrote:
| registered users or hits? I guess the later only.
| indymike wrote:
| > There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving
| small social network.
|
| Says the post on a thriving _discussion forum_ that isn 't
| even a social network. Quality has a quality all of its own.
| djur wrote:
| I don't like checking different apps per se, but I absolutely
| want to have distinct social networking profiles and
| communities for my different interests. I'm happy to share my
| unremarkable opinions about technology with a wide audience,
| but I'd prefer not to talk about politics with everybody with
| a smartphone. I don't want to inflict my video game
| shitposting on my mom who wants to share her Wordle scores
| with me. For those who are inclined to such a thing, I don't
| think anyone would prefer to see their boss see them tweet
| peach emojis at influencers doing squats. And so on. None of
| the existing social networks perfectly serves all use cases,
| and I don't think they can.
| maeln wrote:
| Maybe for the recent idea of social network. But back in the
| 2000', a lot of "social network" were IRC server/channel and
| forums. And they were often small and meant for a specific
| community/hobby/interest.
|
| The idea of a social network where almost all of your friend
| and family are on, is really something that started in the
| 2020'.
|
| In many way, Mastodon is just the phpBB of the 2020', with
| the added benefit that you could connect to other phpBB
| instances.
|
| And even though hosting your own phpBB instance or
| IRC/TeamSpeak/Mumble server kinda fell out of favor due to
| Reddit and Discord, they also kind of act in the same way.
| Sure you have one login to access all the community instead
| of having to have a separate account for each, but each
| community are their own bubble and can moderate however they
| like. It is not a "worlwide forum" like twitter or instagram.
| pavon wrote:
| > The idea of a social network where almost all of your
| friend and family are on, is really something that started
| in the 2020'.
|
| I would disagree with the timing here. I think the peak
| "everyone on one network" was Facebook in the early 2010's
| and since then the market has splintered to other social
| networks, sometimes along generational lines, others based
| on use case.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| > But back in the 2000', a lot of "social network" were IRC
| server/channel and forums. And they were often small and
| meant for a specific community/hobby/interest.
|
| I was never a heavy IRC user, but yeah back in the 00s,
| especially the earlier two-thirds, I had several different
| forums on my browser hotbar that I'd make the rounds
| through a couple of times each day.
|
| Kind of miss that honestly, each forum was its own unique
| beast with an entirely different set of personalities
| without also being polarized. Contrast that to modern
| social networks which have a samey grey-paste quality
| unless one seeks out highly polarized services, which are
| often too caustic to spend time in without risking becoming
| similarly caustic yourself.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| You're speaking of a time when the Internet itself wasn't
| really thriving - it was barely a curiosity that didn't
| exist in the lives of the vast majority of people in the
| world in any way at all.
|
| With all of their downsides, it's only huge social networks
| that actually brought the vast majority of people to the
| internet at all.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| > You're speaking of a time when the Internet itself
| wasn't really thriving - it was barely a curiosity that
| didn't exist in the lives of the vast majority of people
| in the world in any way at all.
|
| It was thriving for me, and I was barely a teenager at
| the time.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Many of us software devs are a different sort.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| There is a "vibrancy" to social networks that are growing
| that is difficult to quantify or even explain. I'm still on
| IRC, I'm still on some phpbbs that the average age of the
| users must be somewhere in the middle 50s, and which might
| get 10 new sign ups every year. They started out big, but
| the attrition is much greater than any growth (I doubt that
| most of the new signups even stick around).
|
| That's why social networks seem so magical early on, not
| only is everyone you like maybe on them, but there will be
| new people in the next week, month, or year that you'll
| like too. New things and new ideas are possible. But at
| some point, this turns sour. Eternal September _describes_
| that phenomenon, I think, but doesn 't explain it well.
|
| In some unfortunate networks, I think the latter can come
| even before the former (preempting it, making it
| impossible). You don't ever get the golden age.
|
| Mastadon looks alot like this. Ignoring the politics, it
| looks alot like Voat did, and all the "we didn't learn the
| lessons of Voat" reddit alternatives that came after. It's
| almost as if you can't build a social network as a refugee
| tent city and make anything that anyone wants. Maybe that's
| the problem. In such a place where everyone is fleeing,
| there is nothing new there. It's all the same old people
| who were at the last place with you, there is nothing new
| about it.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The existance of Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram,
| TikTok, Hacker News, _Mastodon_ is proof this is not true.
| burkaman wrote:
| Ever heard of Hacker News?
| bee_rider wrote:
| That's not a social network, that's a celebrity gossip site.
| The appeal of a social network is that all my friends are
| there.
| mcv wrote:
| I've never used any of the big social networks to talk with
| my friends. I have no idea if they even are on Facebook or
| Twitter. But they have email and we have our own Discord
| place.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a
| large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on
| Bluesky, etc.
|
| Which I think is a good thing, and it's also how it was before,
| on the BBS/Forums days.
| princevegeta89 wrote:
| I don't understand the "doomed" concept here. How can a non-
| profit be doomed? Even if it shuts down, it's still not doomed
| since someone else will fork the project over or take
| ownership.
| afavour wrote:
| Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and
| complexity of running an instance. That doesn't really have
| much to do with whether it rivals other social networks or not.
|
| But I agree, a better headline would be "Mastodon is Doomed as
| a Twitter replacement". It's fine for Mastodon to not want to
| be that. But at the same time a lot of recent arrivals were
| perfectly happy on Twitter and have only moved because of
| Musk's shenanigans. So long term they'll probably jump ship if
| a viable alternative comes along.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and
| complexity of running an instance.
|
| Correction: Most of the author's complaints are about the
| cost and complexity of running a _large_ instance. I know
| people running their own instances, with less than 10 users,
| yet they are happily tooting with people in other instances.
| They aren 't missing out on something that I, on one of the
| largest instances, have.
| afavour wrote:
| Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If
| you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is
| going to start getting a lot busier?
| prmoustache wrote:
| > Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no?
| If you have a user that follows 10k people then your
| server is going to start getting a lot busier?
|
| If you have a user that starts following 10k user in a
| short time, you have a spam bot and not a user.
|
| The fediverse is not made in such a way that your social
| circle grows quickly. You usually starts by following
| people on your own instance, then people whose content is
| boosted by them and it only happens slowly and gradually.
| kjjhhhhyy wrote:
| No, this isn't really true, once you interact with
| another homeserver Mastodon starts slurping up content
| from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with
| content.
|
| The users it finds aren't necessarily ones you've
| interacted with -- I know from running single server
| instances
|
| I stopped running an instance because of this
| functionality. I was running Mastodon on my home Internet
| and quickly became concerned about the image content it
| was downloading from users I hadn't interacted with,
| while I wasn't monitoring the server
|
| There is a LOT of lolicon content on the Fediverse and
| NOTHING is worth the risk of running a server that might
| download material that's considered to be CSAM to my
| local computer while it is unsupervised
|
| So you have to worry about both the quantity of content
| it downloads and what that content is
|
| As an admin: no thanks.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the
| third tab on the home screen with content.
|
| Your statement is a hint to the problem.
|
| From what I find on the Internet, you can still
| communicate/follow people on other servers _without_
| getting their timelines. It 's just that the default
| setting is to pull everything from those relays and you
| need to disable it.
|
| With that setting, you'll get everything people you
| follow on other instances, but not more. The "Federated
| timeline" tab will remain empty.
| prmoustache wrote:
| This.
|
| I have two separate identities on 2 instances. One has only
| 40 members, on which I am a moderator, which is a subset of
| a forum's community and both being funded with donation and
| a yearly fee to be allowed to post ads in the local
| marketplace. The other one is much larger but runs on a
| single Hetzner VPS and is also funded with donation. Admin
| recently switched registration to manual approval, probably
| to control and limit the amount of accounts.
|
| If I ever have to run my own fediverse/activity pub
| server/community, I would definitely put a limit on the
| active accounts I would serve and have an housekeeping rule
| to clean up inactive profiles.
| gnramires wrote:
| Moreover, I am on a large instance (social.coop) and living
| happily -- I pay a monthly fee and I'm confident it'll last
| pretty much forever (they also have a governance plan,
| which I find important!). I also support mastodon itself.
| Given the number of large servers that are financially
| healthy, [1] I don't expect this trend to break so soon.
| Given this voluntary nature however, I think the devs might
| be underestimating the importance of low running costs...
| but at scale I'm sure efficiency will improve (in the last
| case through alternative servers!).
|
| I'm more genuinely worried about Mastodon and other parts
| of Fediverse forgetting why they were made in the first
| place. They are made as a network for the users, not for
| selling ads. They can make every decision with the users
| wellbeing in mind and this is incredibly powerful in
| today's world. (if they stick to that, I'm sure they'll
| find a lot of success)
|
| Selling out as the author seems to suggest would make them
| into a boring Twitter clone as far as I can tell.
|
| [1] not only mastodon.social, also others like
| mstdn.social, fosstodon.org, and more -- if not, check with
| your instance maintainer :)
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| It wasn't always this way because it was never technologically
| possible.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| > The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary
| for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We
| might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large
| chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky,
| etc.
|
| I don't think people want that. I mean some people, sure. But
| the network effect is real and I think the market will always
| demand one audience.
|
| Keep in mind this doesn't mean it has to be centralized. It
| could be decentralized but connected. Isn't that kinda what
| Bluesky or Mastadon are shooting for? Decentralized but
| interoperable?
| pl90087 wrote:
| > I think the market will always demand one audience.
|
| What? Ever heard anybody say "follow me on Twitter, Instagram
| and Youtube"? There are plenty more, all have a niche.
| Snapchat, Twitch, Tiktok, you name it. It's already a
| pluralistic world, and one more participant in the "open and
| free" niche is likely to have its place and fans.
| cpach wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| I have around 80 followers in the Fediverse. (I have a
| "locked" profile which means I manually approve follow
| requests, mostly to keep trolls and bots away.) That's not
| a very impressive number. It still is quite enough though,
| I don't complain about the current level of interaction.
| Quality beats quantity.
|
| Unlike Facebook, none of my relatives or middle school
| buddies are there - and to me that's a good thing. To me,
| Facebook is way too large-scale for posting casual status
| updates.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| one network can be amplified by other networks.
|
| for example, i'm not on tiktok but i still see tiktok content
| everyday on twitter, instagram, and reddit. and sometimes the
| news.
| [deleted]
| caycep wrote:
| what if they made fedeverse protocols a standard, i.e. via
| NIST, ethernet, TCP/IP? or even like TSMC chip design
| tools/protocols?
| dickhardt wrote:
| ActivityPub is the core protocol and is a W3C standard
|
| Mastodon is the most popular implementation currently, but
| there are many other implementations in the fediverse
| turnsout wrote:
| That's a common misconception. The network effect works even
| if the network is relatively small. And the market clearly
| does _not_ demand one audience, since we currently have
| Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, YouTube,
| TikTok, Douyin, Weibo, QQ, and so on.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Indeed. The different networks are used by different people
| in different ways to do different things in different
| communities. With some overlap and cross-posting, despite
| some networks making that very difficult.
|
| The strength and weakness of Twitter was dumping "everyone"
| into a very flat network. Increasingly that just sets
| people at war with each other.
| bachmeier wrote:
| A perhaps even larger problem is that Twitter dumps all
| tweets on all topics from everyone into that network. You
| can't follow someone to learn from them in their area of
| expertise without also hearing their political opinions,
| religious biases, and such. That injects conflict even
| though none exists naturally.
|
| I don't know if Mastodon is the answer, but the ability
| to separate your posts by type would be a massive
| improvement. The ability to post on different servers
| makes it possible.
| kibwen wrote:
| _> The network effect works even if the network is
| relatively small._
|
| Let's do some wild guesstimation here.
|
| Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. Let's
| apply that to social connections and assume that any given
| person only cares about interacting with 10% of any given
| crowd. Let's actually be even more generous and assume
| people are an order of magnitude pickier than that: for
| most people, 99% of other people are crap.
|
| Meanwhile, Dunbar's number says that a human only cares
| about socializing with up to 150 people. Dunbar's number
| itself is kind of weird pseudoscience, but it seems
| reasonable to assume that there is an upper bound (or at
| least diminishing returns), so let's be generous and go an
| order of magnitude higher and say that a given person won't
| care about interacting with more than 1,500 specific
| people.
|
| Putting these together, it suggests that being a member of
| a network of 1.5 million individuals ought to suffice to
| give anyone all the social connections they could ever
| want.
|
| Of course, it took silly reasoning to arrive at this
| precise number, but I think there's an element of truth to
| it. The limits of the human ability to socialize mean that,
| beyond a certain point, the size of the network itself is
| no longer the limiting factor on the ability to find people
| to socialize with.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Almost all of them are very different audiences, even
| mediums. Network effect is obviously an important part of a
| social media site, even if it's not completely all-or-
| nothing.
| eitally wrote:
| Yes, but I think the OP was suggesting that the network
| effect to support a platform is much smaller than most
| people would think. Consider all the topical sites
| running PHPBB forums, for example. There are many
| thousands of vibrant communities around the internet, and
| they can all coexist peacefully. Many of them feature
| adds & commercial partnerships, too, and guess what? The
| click-through and performance of those things is
| relatively off-the-charts because they directly relevant
| to the captive audience's interests... especially if
| representatives from the advertisers directly participate
| in the community, which many do, and even moreso if the
| community + advertisers offer IRL community events (which
| many do).
|
| Besides the depth and stickiness of topical communities,
| these sites also tend to be almost universally friendly
| and helpful, even to n00bs and outsiders. It would be a
| tragedy if they were to be replaced by a one-size-fits-
| none platform.
| cpach wrote:
| It is an important part, that's true. But not every
| scene/forum/product needs to reach the kind of scale
| where you would start thinking about running Superbowl
| ads.
| skrowl wrote:
| [dead]
| Finnucane wrote:
| >the market will always demand one audience.
|
| People who have an interest in large audiences (media folks
| and celebrities) will demand one audience, but they aren't
| necessarily the whole market. Many will be fine to be
| elsewhere. Even twitter didn't provide 'one audience' at its
| peak.
| a4isms wrote:
| If the market demanded one audience...
|
| 1. Why was HN founded, and;
|
| 2. Why did Reddit create the subreddit?
|
| Unnecessary hint: Both questions have the same answer.
| [deleted]
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Who's "people"? Who is "the market"?
|
| I use mastodon at the moment and I get value from it. It was
| network effects that brought me there - at the same time I
| wanted to join it, a bunch of people I was following
| elsewhere also moved there.
|
| _A_ "market" seems to be happy with Mastodon, as evidenced
| by a non-trivial amount of people using it.
| Beldin wrote:
| Hear, hear. I was there in the time of webrings and it was
| glorious! All sorts of quirky little works of art waiting
| to be discovered.
|
| Then came the monolithic social networks, and we
| collectively changed from the weird and wondrous adventure
| mode into the TV-dinner that is the web nowadays. Neither
| is perfect, and I'm not sure at all how to have both. But
| I'm glad the pendulum is swinging a tiny bit back.
| api wrote:
| I think the parent is referring to content creators and
| people who want to reach a large audience. These people
| will naturally gravitate to the largest hubs to minimize
| the amount of work required for maximum reach.
|
| Personally I think that whole aspect of social media is
| toxic so I don't care, but others are not going to agree.
| I'm happy with an enclave where I hear the people I want to
| hear and am not hit with a bunch of spam and propaganda.
| eternalban wrote:
| The siloes may actually (re)boot a working 'society'.
| _Word of mouth_ , _social introduction_ , _[restricted
| /specialized] meeting and discussion spaces_, created the
| original (RL) societies. Societies originally _emerged_
| from a disconnected human background. The same can and
| likely* will happen again.
|
| * Generative AI's gift to human intellectual and cultural
| rebirth will actually be due to its motivating the birth
| of numerous curated spaces of discourse and interaction,
| with strict AI content policies. I predict there will be
| a cambrian explosion of these boutique spaces. And
| _society 2.0_ will emerge from this.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Mastodon is a failed product because Mr Beast doesn't use
| it? I don't think that makes sense.
| cpach wrote:
| _* cries in timeline free from Mr Beast *_
| dsr_ wrote:
| Mastodon is likely better off if "content creators" avoid
| it.
| [deleted]
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| > the market will always demand one audience
|
| Is this the demand of the market, or the demand of the
| marketer? And in either case, why should the rest of us care?
| After seeing their work, I have a rather negative view of
| their decisions.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| > We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic
| centralized social media platforms, but if we peek over our
| recency bias, we can see that it wasn't always that way.
|
| It wasn't always that way, but it nearly always _ends up_ that
| way. Reason being the Internet makes it extremely easy to
| discover new services, and switching costs are relatively low.
| So this leads to the "winner take all (or nearly all)"
| dynamics that are so prevalent on the web - a service only
| needs to be slightly better than it's competitors to win.
|
| People talk about the concentration of big Internet projects
| and companies as if it were imposed from on high. The exact
| opposite happened: people flocked to the services they found to
| be the best, and told their friends about them.
| ryanklee wrote:
| Hmm, switching costs are high when monoliths reign, and
| competitors need to be much, much better in order to attract
| people from other offerings.
|
| I think what you are pointing to is how network effects suck
| up customers the first time when there's basically no
| competition doing the same thing. E.g. Facebook was doing
| something much, much better than myspace, and people flocked.
| But after that, switching costs became very high because of
| how entrenched people were on FB. It took an entire
| generation for that effect to atrophy, and this is unlikely
| because there were better alternatives, and more likely
| because of sociodynamics.
|
| Now it's TikTok and Twitter and people are having a very
| tough time figuring out how to get out of those platforms
| even when they sorta hate them. High switching costs because
| of network effects.
|
| Doesn't matter if there's a slightly better product. There
| needs to be either a massively better product or the existing
| products need to be seen as culturally undesirable (e.g.
| Facebook is cringe).
| loudmax wrote:
| The appeal of a federated platform is that it's decentralized
| without being siloed. If Bluesky decides it's in their
| interest, they could probably figure out some way to federate
| with Mastodon.
| wslh wrote:
| Yes, it is always good to remember that the BitTorrent protocol
| is successful though.
| RajT88 wrote:
| That was my kneejerk reaction too. It's like saying, "PHPBB is
| doomed!".
| system16 wrote:
| > The reality is people don't want to pick their favorite
| community,
|
| > Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn
| diagrams of lots of communities and interests. Selecting a
| username can be difficult, deciding which community you want as
| part of your identity--even if you can change it--is too much.
| The act of choosing a server has kept more than a few people away
| from Mastodon.
|
| This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential
| Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would
| be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit. I like
| football and tech and travel, but I don't see why I would want to
| link my identity directly to one of these interests. And yes, I
| understand I can still communicate with other instances or can
| change my instance if needed, but the fact this even needs to be
| qualified is friction, especially for new non-technical users.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Mastodon project seems to be very aware of it this. I believe
| gargron said recently in an interview they're changing the
| mobile app to default to mastodon.social, and putting signing
| up for other instances behind another "Advanced" screen or
| something.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-inter...
|
| _> mastodon.social isn't actually the default in our app. It's
| just one of the top ones that shows up. However, I think that
| possibly going forward, we might rework the onboarding user
| experience into presenting a default option as well as an
| advanced option, where all that stuff with choosing a server
| would basically be hidden away from the people who get
| intimidated by choice. _
| romwell wrote:
| >This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential
| Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It
| would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit.
|
| I said this last time Mastodon was discussed here, and was
| downvoted to hell by fans of the platform.
|
| The best part is a particular subreddit being able to ban you
| _from the entire platform_ because they don 't like what you do
| _in another subreddit_.
|
| Thanks, but no thanks.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I'm checking in regularly to see if it's Twitter yet (the only
| reason I'd use it) and so far it's not. It's slowly getting
| closer but still a long way off the time when you can just use it
| as a timeline of tweets from 100 known people like I use Twitter.
|
| I realize becoming Twitter is a non-goal, but the actual goals
| are also uninteresting to most I think.
| iepathos wrote:
| Vaguely reminds me of late 90's early 00's articles saying linux
| was doomed lol. The reasons are all similar anti-open source
| reasons. General disregard for personal responsibility and
| ownership along with preference of the masses towards ease of
| use.
| distantsounds wrote:
| He's not wrong. I'd love to join the fediverse but I want to do
| so on my own terms with my own server, and I don't want to set up
| an entire mastodon instance just to do that. Making activitypub
| synonymous with mastodon is dangerous and i am sure is not what
| the intention is.
| some_furry wrote:
| Despite all this gloom and doom talk, this essay ends with,
| "Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have
| lots of happy users."
|
| What does doomed mean then, Justin?
|
| For contrast, "No VC will dump loads of money into it" isn't
| exactly a gloomy forecast.
| yborg wrote:
| It's a gloomy forecast if you're a hype cycle grifter or some
| rando looking to become a platform influencer. Now you have to
| find some other bandwagon to climb on.
| atak1 wrote:
| I also never really got into Mastodon. My belief is that you
| still need to build a 10x better product, and Mastodon hasn't
| achieved that.
|
| Now, the upside for Mastodon is - they have a great platform that
| a number of people have flocked to bc of the Twitter backlash.
| Can they create sustainable value for the communities (or people
| within those communities)? What do people who run these
| communities want (beyond decentralization)?
|
| Personally, I think the crux is reputation-building. You need to
| give a few Mastodon users a sense of pride in engaging everyday
| with their community. From the handful of servers I'm on, I don't
| see this clearly happening yet. But hope they can get there!
| drcongo wrote:
| This post should have (2017) in the title. Not because that's
| when it was written, but because that's when all the articles
| it's a rehash of were written.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| _Beyond scaling concerns is the legal responsibility. If you host
| an instance for other people you should be prepared to invest
| time documenting and training moderators..._
|
| The idea that there are laws that surround this stuff...laws that
| lock out enthusiastic people from sharing their own Mastodon
| servers with the world, is so sad to me.
|
| It's antithetical to the hacker spirit and it will stifle any
| grassroots effort.
|
| The web has gotten _way_ too serious.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Yeah, I'm hoping he's wrong, but this good analysis.
|
| Count me in as among those who actively _does want Mastodon to be
| the new Twitter._
|
| Its becoming increasingly clear to me that a hugely scaled
| microblogging platform is important (if not essential) to world
| discourse and democracy, and that a federated platform is
| probably the long term best, if not easiest, way to do it.
|
| Honestly, the bit that kind of baffles me is the extent to which
| _big companies_ don 't seem to realize that this solves potential
| "Eli Lilly" problems. This shouldn't be too hard to explain
| either.
|
| "Hey, you know how you can own your email and your website? You
| can do that too with something like twitter if everyone starts
| using Mastodon. You should throw some money at a server to do
| that."
| mnd999 wrote:
| I used to run my own server. Then I checked out #nsfw to see how
| much porn was getting federated into my google cloud storage
| bucket. I don't want to have a Google account limiting argument
| with Google about this so it seemed safer to move to somebody
| else's server.
| PinguTS wrote:
| This article reads like the first articles about Twitter.
| duxup wrote:
| I'm not sure that makes sense.
|
| I can't imagine discussing twitter in the early days and how
| users / communities have to manage servers / are shutting down,
| etc.
| yborg wrote:
| You obviously weren't on Twitter in the early days of the
| Failwhale and "Twitter will never scale." In fact, the
| original Ruby implementation didn't scale and was eventually
| discarded. The same thing will happen with Mastodon if it
| becomes necessary.
| afavour wrote:
| I really wish Mastodon wasn't absorbing 95% of the ActivityPub
| hype because everything in this article is correct. The good news
| is that there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a
| Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn't use Ruby and
| Postgres. Every story I hear about backlogs of Sidekiq jobs in
| Mastodon instances makes it feel like a nightmare.
|
| More broadly though I think Mastodon is going to fail as a mass
| thing because it isn't actually what people want. A lot of recent
| arrivals want Twitter without the corporate ownership but
| Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with
| inefficient links between them rather than one whole. You can't
| even see all the replies to a message by default, it only shows
| you on-instance replies! And how any brand new user is supposed
| to knowledgeably choose an instance is a mystery to me.
|
| Even as a veteran user I find the instance system awkward. I have
| many interests, how do I pick an instance to be my home? Should
| it be a web dev instance? A music instance? In some ways I prefer
| the idea of signing up on both and having people be able to
| follow me based on topic interest but Mastodon doesn't really
| have a good concept of unifying profiles in that way. Not to
| mention I'd then be paying to support two instances instead of
| one.
| mariusor wrote:
| > Mastodon doesn't really have a good concept of unifying
| profiles in that way.
|
| I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle.
| There's no need for multiple profiles if you can easily
| participate and be a part of both communities but at the same
| time not be a user of any of them.
|
| That's the benefit that Mastodon doesn't have, because their
| model of how federated communities should work predates
| ActivityPub's spec finalization.
|
| I think your use case would be satisfied if as a user you could
| "subscribe" to all activities generated on a server (or
| multiple), while your account would be on another one.
|
| ActivityPub makes this flow relatively simple, and one of the
| projects I'm working in the space has it as a design goal:
| small instances addressing themselves to communities with
| relatively low numbers (500-1k people), but at the same time
| the participation and receiving of updates from any other
| community in the network would be a click away.
| fuzzehchat wrote:
| Pleroma is lightweight and fast.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a
| Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn't use Ruby and
| Postgres
|
| There's Akkoma (Elixir, Postgres) or GotoSocial (Go, SQLite) or
| Takahe (Python, Postgres) and probably some I've not even
| encountered as yet.
|
| 'KomoD and 'RobotToaster remind me of Pleroma (Elixir,
| Postgres) which Akkoma was forked from.
| everybodyknows wrote:
| From
|
| https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/
|
| > Federation Issues > > Since every ActivityPub server
| implementation has a slightly different interpretation of the
| protocol, some servers don't quite federate properly with
| GoToSocial yet ...
|
| How's the specification/validation effort for ActivityPub
| progressing?
|
| https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
| zimpenfish wrote:
| The only servers I currently have an issue with federating
| from my GtS instance are Honk instances and that's because
| (I'm reasonably sure) of a Honk weirdness.
|
| YMMV, obvs.
| KomoD wrote:
| There's also Pleroma
| kkklppubgdzs wrote:
| Some Mastodon instances block all Pleroma instances because
| they don't like the developer's politics though so you have
| to keep that in mind
| FalconSensei wrote:
| Just my experience, but I think it might also be the type
| of users/instances.
|
| Haven't had much trouble now (perhaps my current instance
| blocks pleroma), but a few years ago I dropped Mastodon
| because I was getting the same amount of attrition than
| on Twitter. And every time, is was a Pleroma user. I even
| voted on a ticket to create 'local-only' posts, because I
| didn't wanna handle Pleroma users...
| kkklppubgdzs wrote:
| A lot of Pleroma users have different politics than
| Mastodon users because of the history of infighting
| between the developers, but this doesn't change the fact
| that people making stereotypes about the views of users
| based on the software their instance uses 1) hurts single
| user instances of Pleroma which are much easier to run
| than Mastodon and 2) makes the whole ActivityPub network
| more toxic and cliquish
|
| If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than
| the others you might be part of a clique
|
| That said I don't know why anyone would assume that the
| Fediverse would be better moderated than Twitter when the
| architecture of the protocol makes regulating "attrition"
| harder, not easier.
| FalconSensei wrote:
| > If one software type is giving you more "attrition"
| than the others you might be part of a clique
|
| At that time, it was just the fact that I was a windows
| user.
|
| And once because I posted a pic of me watching anime on
| my TV, and someone asked how I got screenshots for
| posting them on mastodon/blog later. User was definitely
| not pleased that I mentioned I got from /r/anime
| discussion thread for each episode
|
| But yeah, I'm definitely part of a clique of normies that
| just wanna use a social network to chat with people
| Zak wrote:
| If anything is going to strangle the usability of
| federated social networking, it's petty or indiscriminate
| server blocking. I just saw a popular tips account
| suggesting that everyone running a smaller server should
| block mastodon.social if it grew over 50% of the active
| userbase.
|
| Pleroma was the first ActivityPub server I tried running
| for myself. I picked it for technical reasons. I switched
| from it to Mastodon for UX reasons. I don't know anything
| about the politics of either lead developer, but I think
| both have crappy design decisions around how they display
| images by default.
|
| Of course, block anything you want on your single-user
| server, and any persistent sources of abusive behavior if
| you're running servers for other people.
| BryantD wrote:
| Anyone have any insight into the state of Takahe? Progress
| has slowed down a lot in the last two months.
| aquova wrote:
| > Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with
| inefficient links between them rather than one whole
|
| I think this is the key element that Mastodon needs to focus on
| to make the overall experience smoother. I've been using
| Mastodon for a while now, and the experience actually gets
| smoother the more you use it. Eventually you find enough people
| to follow that you forget many of them might be on instances
| other than your own, but when you're new, you mainly just have
| the local feed to go on. My account is honestly on a server
| with a community that doesn't quite fit my personal niche, and
| if it was smoother to switch servers I probably would, but I
| also don't feel limited by that choice as much as I initially
| did.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| >The good news is that there are folks (and I forget the name,
| doh) working on a Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn't
| use Ruby and Postgres.
|
| pleroma?
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > I really wish Mastodon wasn't absorbing 95% of the
| ActivityPub hype
|
| Would be good to revisit this in 12 months. Medium and Tumblr
| seem to be keen to start to interop with ActivityPub.
| Supposedly even Meta is building on top of ActivityPub for a
| new service (which I can't seem to find a good source to link
| to, so who knows).
|
| I think ActivityPub is the new thing, so Mastodon has a bit of
| a first-ish mover advantage on it. Once all the big platforms
| get their proecjts out I think it'll get real interesting.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > A lot of recent arrivals want Twitter without the corporate
| ownership
|
| Which you can have on mastodon.social. Go sign up there if you
| want a non-corporate Twitter. Signups should be open now.
|
| Even if 90% of users are on a single instance, having a
| federated protocol matters as an insurance policy. If Oracle
| somehow assumes control of mastodon.social next year, everyone
| can move to some other instance and retain their connections.
|
| Furthermore, if someone else creates a better vision of social
| networking in the future, users will be able to switch one-by-
| one and continue communicating across platforms. There won't be
| a built-in imbalance due to the incumbent's network effect.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| Wondering same thing here. Isn't there a possibility of a
| solution emerging in the coming years? If so why/why not?
| genewitch wrote:
| I run a misskey server on a VM on hardware dedicated to _our_
| stuff - we control the hypervisor on the boxes, we "own the IP
| space", manage backups, etc. Misskey is a federated activitypub
| instance; and in my opinion it is better than mastodon at being
| a "twitter replacement."
|
| I checked the dashboard for my _four_ user instance (myself and
| 3 others, total) and we 're currently pub/sub to ~~5200~~ 5219
| instances. I added a curated list of "journalists" across the
| federated activitypub realm, around 1300. So now i have
| basically the "news" part of twitter, 24/7, without all of the
| jokes, memes, and trash found on twitter. I also am on
| fosstodon, but I maintain that as a backup for _another_
| mastodon instance i have an account on, where both the
| maintainer and the public face of the instance have a "you get
| what you pay for" / "that's tough, suck it up" mentality toward
| maintenance and downtime (they're approaching less than 1 nine
| for the month of april). I am unsure of how many accounts
| fosstodon has, the local feed is pretty slow, so i'd guess
| between 1000-5000 users, the other mastodon instance is capped
| at 10,000 users, and a job removes everyone who has not logged
| in for a year, and signups are once a year (and maybe a thing
| of the past, to hear the "leader" talk).
|
| I really like misskey. I'd probably like something else more,
| as i can't admin misskey competently - most of the online help,
| advanced documentation, etc is in Japanese.
|
| For the record: currently 600GB attached; 130GB used, 24GB for
| / and 105GB for the misskey/files folder. It has 8GB of ram and
| 4 threads; it uses all 8 without OOM, and ~5% of the CPU. I
| don't really know the network throughput, but it's on par with
| a webforum with 3600 uniques per day. activitypub and the
| fediverse allows for more multimedia to be shared, faster and
| with less friction, so that explains some similarities and
| differences i see between these two decentralized services.
| pkulak wrote:
| > Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with
| inefficient links between them rather than one whole. You can't
| even see all the replies to a message by default, it only shows
| you on-instance replies!
|
| I fail to see the issue here. I'm not sure I care about seeing
| the most recent replies to something, from anyone, anywhere, vs
| the comments from the server I'm on, from the community I'm
| actively involved with.
|
| I like that my server doesn't bring in garbage from around the
| whole of the internet with perfect efficiency.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| While I agree, I believe we are in the minority.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| Do those folks address the issue of ActivityPub transmitting
| massive amounts of data with 10000+ users? That's one of the
| main issues the big Mastodon communities have.
| mariusor wrote:
| I would love to see some data about what you speak of, but a
| raw ActivityPub activity is maybe 1K in size. Propagating 1K
| sized payloads from 10K people (let's say that gives us about
| 10 per second) should not be that big of a deal in the age of
| streaming. I think unofficial censuses would put the total
| instance number at around 25000, so that's about the maximum
| number of outgoing messages a server would send.
|
| 25000(instances) * 10(messages/second) * 1000(bytes) =
| 256000000 bytes/s = 256MB/s of outgoing traffic
|
| Where Mastodon really gets it wrong is with the incessant
| caching of media that every instance does, and which is what
| maybe you are inadvertently thinking of.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| It may just be Mastodon which has the problem. Still,
| competitors should make sure to not re-create the problem.
|
| I don't remember the specific comment but something about
| how one of the top Mastodon servers was transmitting 100TB
| of data a month, or some other else unreasonably high
| number. This server only had ~10,000 users.
| mariusor wrote:
| If my math doesn't fail me that's almost an order of
| magnitude lower than 256MB/s. :D
|
| I'm suprised I got so close with my back of the napkin
| calculation.
|
| But what would you consider reasonable data usage for 10K
| users? Is it maybe possible that a technology that's
| trying to demonopolyse social networks is probably not
| optimised for high user counts on individual servers?
| armchairhacker wrote:
| I don't know how much data Hacker News transmits but I'm
| certain it's under 100TB/month. I do know HN has >6
| million requests per day and only runs on 1 server
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379).
|
| I'm sure Mastodon requires more data-per-user than HN,
| and a server with 1M+ users will be expensive. But I
| don't think 10,000 users is that much, and a server with
| that many shouldn't cost $1000+/mo to operate.
| charrondev wrote:
| A couple things that I would imagine add to the cost with
| federation:
|
| Bandwidth costs for user content. You aren't just hosting
| the content of 10k users but caching and serving the
| content of everyone you federate with.
|
| Either that or the software would have to be very
| inefficient.
| redder23 wrote:
| Let Mastodon die and let Nostr take over. Nostr to me sounds
| superior in pretty much every way.
| mariusor wrote:
| Too bad you don't let us know how exactly.
| KomoD wrote:
| Please explain how it's superior? When I looked at it months
| ago someone was hardcore spamming porn images with fresh
| identities each time in the global feed, and all client
| implementations were terrible.
| Ciantic wrote:
| Interestingly today's Vergecast episode "ActivityPub is the next
| big thing in social" [1] touched on monetization.
|
| What I understood from Mike Cue, the monetization implementations
| won't come from Mastodon, but from established companies building
| new things, like Flipboard or Medium.
|
| They are also thinking what needs to be added to protocol to
| support monetization.
|
| IMO it doesn't need any features for monetization. ActivityPub
| allows creators to create accounts and allow only paid followers,
| or send their toots to payed subset of followers.
|
| Problem is what servers would the masses gather? Who ever is the
| biggest node will of course set the rules.
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/activitypub-is-the-nex...
| segasaturn wrote:
| Tumblr is adopting ActivityPub and will become the largest node
| on the network when its completed.
| mariusor wrote:
| Did anything happen in this direction since Mullenweg said
| they're going to add support? I am skeptical of them
| following through with it.
| brycewray wrote:
| Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701341
| agentultra wrote:
| I've been around since before the Internet was available to most
| folks. Seen it grow, lived through Eternal September, watched all
| the technology revolutions come and go. It's fun reading
| predictions like this some times.
|
| In the late aughts FB was only getting started. xkcd drew a map
| of the Internet at the time where FB became a huge land mass and
| all of the other popular sites at the time were beginning to
| dwindle as little islands and archipelagos. Funny how from then
| until 2016 or so that FB continued to dominate and take over.
|
| Google, Twitter, etc joined the fray too and the idea of
| centralized social networks taking over everything became the new
| normal. Businesses replaced their websites with Facebook pages
| and Instagram accounts. Developers stopped hosting their vanity
| sites and wrote Medium articles instead.
|
| But before all of that got going, before VC money and HN and the
| current crop of IPOs took hold, there was a period in the early
| aughts when much of the foundations of what we know the Internet
| today was built... by hobbyists, hackers, and the OSS community.
| Some of us worked at company's that funded our efforts, some of
| us built things to satisfy our own needs and communities.
|
| But many predicted it would all go away under the pressures of
| capital and an influx of non-technical, casual users.
|
| In a sense it did. But I think Mastodon and ActivityPub's
| continued existence and thriving communities wouldn't have been
| predicted by someone in 2016-2017.
|
| Doomed? We'll see.
| fallat wrote:
| There will and probably already are server implementations that
| are resource minimal and easy setup. There's nothing about
| ActivityPub that stops this.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _shrug_
|
| FidoNet was doomed, too, in the long run.
|
| Newsfroups were doomed, in the long run.
|
| AOL was doomed, too.
|
| Friendster. Livejournal. The Blogosphere.
|
| Flickr. Xanga. Diaryland.
|
| Myspace. Twitter. Facebook.
|
| Tiktok. Instagram. Youtube. Discord. IRC. Slack.
|
| That thing you're working on that involves a blockchain. Nostr.
| Bluesky.
|
| I give you this litany of doomed social networks.
|
| Some have fallen long ago. Some are still hanging on. Some are
| just beginning to fall.
|
| Mastodon, right now, is rising. In ten years will we still be
| using it? In ten years will we remember it fondly as a
| transitional stage to whatever future ActivityPub clients and
| hosts we use to connect with our friends, build communities, and
| share the work of filtering out people who want to use us purely
| as a source of profit, or who are actively opposed to our
| continuing existence? In ten years will we all once more be in
| one monolithic corporate-owned profit-seeking social network,
| remembering wistfully when it looked like we might be breaking
| free of those chains for a while?
|
| Even so, whatever we are using in that future: it, too, is
| doomed. Newspapers were doomed. Magazines were doomed. Social
| media is doomed.
|
| Mastodon is hiring right now. Do you think it needs to be lighter
| on resources, easier to run, easier to personalize? I run one and
| I certainly think so. Do you have the skills to make it those
| things? Send them a resume. Tell them that this is what you want
| to do. Do you have the money to not worry about paying the bills
| for a few years after, say, working at Disney's feature division,
| then helping them build their streaming service, then moving over
| to Amazon for a while? Then take a working vacation: grab the
| source, start making proposals, start offering major patches.
|
| Mastodon is doomed. Will you stand by and comment on its demise?
| Will you do something to keep it running? Will you try to hasten
| that doom for the good of the Fediverse by building an
| alternative server with a well-tested "import everything from an
| existing Mastodon in one click" button?
|
| I dunno, I'm not you.
| cornhole34 wrote:
| [flagged]
| albertkinng wrote:
| [flagged]
| louison11 wrote:
| A technologically interesting product and a relevant commercial
| product are two vastly different things. Problem with these
| projects is they are driven by technical curiosity instead of
| being run like businesses.
|
| The sweet spot is finding ways in which decentralization fits use
| cases that centralization cannot provide, all while being vastly
| superior to everything else. That hasn't been the case so far for
| social media.
| dkuntz2 wrote:
| this whole article is literally FUD.
|
| "some instances shut down", "there might be a CVE and everyone
| will reevaluate", "moderation isn't centralized"
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> All of those "features" come with with a heavy price--
| responsibility._
|
| This is the issue with many of these types of services. Geeks
| love them; but no one else does. I don't like running a VPS or an
| AWS instance, because of all the overhead, so I tend to use
| shared hosting. I'm quite capable of running a VPS, but I can't
| be arsed.
|
| I suspect that we'll be seeing some fairly large corporate
| Mastodon servers (like...say... _Twitter_ ). These are likely to
| be popular.
| hinkley wrote:
| We need some turnkey VPS hardware, and a lot of these problems
| would be greatly reduced.
| safety1st wrote:
| None of that was enough to stop email. Free is a very good
| price.
|
| Once it was obvious that emailing was a thing many people
| wanted to do, and a free server became available, servers
| started springing up all over the place, many more
| implementations of the underlying protocols were developed,
| businesses figured out various ways to monetize, the standards
| evolved (somewhat).
|
| Now let's do an inventory on ActivityPub...
|
| 1) It became obvious that tweeting was a thing many people
| wanted to do? Check
|
| 2) A free server became available? Check
|
| 3) Servers started springing up all over the place? Check
| https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/m...
|
| 4) More implementations were developed? That's where we are now
|
| 5, 6) Stay tuned
| romwell wrote:
| >None of that was enough to stop email. Free is a very good
| price.
|
| You missed some steps in your inventory listing though:
|
| 0)Able to communicate with anyone else with an account,
| regardless of which server they have signed up with? [ Nope.
| ]
| FredPret wrote:
| - With email, it was very easy to join and use. Get an email
| account, get an email address, send the email. Done. You can
| email anyone who has email.
|
| - With Mastodon, it's immediately more complicated than that.
|
| - Free isn't a factor in Mastodon's favour because Twitter,
| Facebook, and Instagram are also free. And it's simple to
| understand and join.
|
| - Everyone is on Twitter, so if you want to see their tweets,
| you have to join too.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| >Everyone is on Twitter
|
| Not anymore and less each day. Twitter is no longer a valid
| choice for a lot of people.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > - With Mastodon, it's immediately more complicated than
| that.
|
| Is there something inherit in Mastodon that makes it more
| complicated, or is this an obstacle that can be overcome
| (like email did)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect that it's something that could be "skinned"
| with a simpler UX.
|
| I'm writing a _very_ basic social media app, myself,
| right now, and have developed an appreciation for the
| complexity behind the facade.
| eddieroger wrote:
| 7) Google and Microsoft become dominant in the space and make
| deliverability harder for everyone who doesn't want to jump
| hoops to make their server deliverable, and even for those
| who do, sometimes it is literally impossible. For those who
| want to play the game, they do, but most people move to Gmail
| and move on.
| Hamuko wrote:
| > _I suspect that we 'll be seeing some fairly large corporate
| Mastodon servers (like...say...Twitter). These are likely to be
| popular._
|
| Aren't the most popular ones already ran by companies?
|
| As far as I can see from the data, the most popular is
| mastodon.social (ran by Mastodon gGmbH), followed by Pawoo
| (Russell Co., Ltd / formerly Pixiv Co., Ltd), mstdn.jp
| (Sujitech, LLC), baraag.net (independent) and mastodon.cloud
| (Sujitech, LLC).
| local_crmdgeon wrote:
| I've said this before on my throwaways - this is the same logic
| as Bitcoin. I don't want more responsibility, I want to use a
| service that works.
|
| Also, like BTC, the whole thing is network effects, and
| barriers to entry dramatically curtail networks. People like
| Twitter because celebrities and journalists use it, not because
| of the data model.
| smoldesu wrote:
| HN has an API and a search database connected to it, but it's
| also "a service that works". It's not as complicated as
| Bitcoin, everything is abstracted as a simple account/forum
| system. The non-user-facing complexity is high, but the user-
| facing complexity is minimum.
|
| That's what ActivityPub integration is going to look like,
| IMO. With companies like Flipboard and Tumblr adding
| integration, it's undeniable that the network is growing
| (even if it's not it's strong suit). For people who want an
| RSS-style feed with light interactive elements, it's a dream
| come true. Maybe that encompasses Twitter users, maybe it
| doesn't.
| Gareth321 wrote:
| This is exactly the problem with Linux. For decades I've been
| seeing developers frothing at the mouth yelling at everyone
| else about how they should switch to Linux. Then they try
| Ubuntu and they can't even change the mouse acceleration
| without hunting down third party tools and they leave and never
| come back. Users need dead simple UX. Mastodon's signup process
| alone has been an absolute nightmare until mastodon.social
| enabled direct signup.
| Tepix wrote:
| " _You can, of course, run your own server. Just like you can run
| your own email server. And you will be blocked from the broader
| public discorse just the same. There will be no way for large
| instances to trust and allow every individual instance. The
| moderation work will be too much and they'll end up trusting only
| large, established instances._ "
|
| I don't think this is happening. Instances are only banned after
| they attract negative attention, not whitelisted, which would be
| antithetical to the idea of federation.
| no_wizard wrote:
| My biggest problem with Mastodon is I'm not really getting good
| casual interactions. I thought it would be more "open" and free
| flowing conversation, but its largely been this loud echo chamber
| of opinions and organic discussion of different things hasn't
| really materialized the way I hoped (this is, in fact, something
| I do get out of current Twitter, believe it or not)
|
| I have tried interacting with different instances and what not,
| going more niche community hasn't materialized very well,
| traction is really low
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I agree with all author remarks in this post.
|
| Turns out that we already have the federated web. If we truly
| wanted to federate social media, we already have federated blogs.
| It has been on the decline a lot, but it's a choice for those who
| truly want it.
|
| I've also thought that if Twitter stopped existing, it'd leave a
| hole Mastodon can never fill. Maybe Bluesky can? but what I'd do
| instead is to invest far more in POSSE, and maybe add a micro-
| blogging feature on my website for these random threads I
| sometimes write (I'd be the only account on my website, though).
|
| From the start, I've also thought Mastodon is doomed, it gave me
| a "code-smell" the double @ usage (one for the username and
| another one for the server itself you belong to). It just never
| did make any sense to me (maybe I'm just criticizing the
| aesthetic aspects of it).
| mariusor wrote:
| > I've also thought that if Twitter stopped existing, it'd
| leave a hole Mastodon can never fill. Maybe Bluesky can?
|
| Why do you think that Bluesky will be able to do what Mastodon
| can't?
| ivanmontillam wrote:
| I mentioned Bluesky just as a competitor in terms of sharing
| the same market with a similarly-specified product, but other
| than "it's a microblogging site" I don't know what else it
| is. I'm not there, yet.
| mariusor wrote:
| From second hand reports - I don't have, nor do I plan to
| have an account - it looks like the user experience on bs
| is worse than even Mastodon. Similarly limited character
| counts, no options for formatting text, no editing, etc.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| > Why do you think that Bluesky will be able to do what
| Mastodon can't?
|
| And, why would you think that Bluesky will be able to do what
| Twitter can't?
|
| i.e. remain both viable and not enshitified (1), in the face
| of the need to either turn a profit or be up for sale? AFAIK,
| Bluesky has the same kind of business model as twitter,
| therefor the same failure mode. Why would I sign up for that
| ride again?
|
| 1) https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
| dragontamer wrote:
| So the approximate fair market cost is roughly 10 cents per
| month? 5 cents for server costs, double that for a decent profit
| margin?
|
| So maybe charge $2/year for the service or something?
| foul wrote:
| If someone wishes for a thriving Fediverse, Mastodon HAS to die.
| And Misskey and Pleroma (and Akkoma, and Takahe) too. The way
| these apps are shaped requires a subscription model or a big
| thankless spender to keep them afloat, they will sooner or later
| be the reason for more siloing incidents and creation of new
| walled gardens. I already know most of the users have no
| alternative, but still.
| solarkraft wrote:
| Just like E-Mail, right?
|
| Really: The federation model is the same. It faces the same
| fundamental constraints (arguably exacerbated by some technical
| ones).
|
| They've been solved for E-Mail. I believe they're solvable for
| ActivityPub by going through similar steps.
|
| We can argue about the centralization of E-Mail all we want:
| There are still multiple companies providing the service and it's
| possible to start your own. Yes, companies - I think that while
| loose and and more or less charitable communities definitely have
| a future, real stability and trust will come from entities large
| enough to be too big to easily fall over (and most naturally
| those are companies with paying users).
|
| I've seen so many small instances go away, leaving their users
| almost completely helpless and effectively locked out of the
| network. Keep in mind that your instance is your identity
| provider (I think there have been efforts to change this, but I'm
| not seeing any ways to migrate from an instance that is already
| gone).
| pizzalife wrote:
| The analogy would be closer to Usenet than email.
| kornhole wrote:
| Activity pub federation is much easier than email. Most of the
| ISP's block email ports on our home connections which requires
| us to setup mail relays just for the email verification of
| account setups. Then you have to do all kinds of work to make
| your email seem valid and not blocked by all the gatekeepers.
| Activity pub is just running over HTTPS, and we can control how
| we federate and block unwanted content with the great tools
| built into most implementations.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > hachyderm.io had trouble scaling ... with 30,000 users and over
| $5000 worth of equipment... They were able to migrate ... to
| Digital Ocean ... at a cost ... [of] more than $1000/mo.
|
| 1 TB of data fits several time in a typical consumer HDD. Is it
| really not enough to have $5,000 USD of hardware to run a
| 30K-user Mastodon instance?
| fuzzehchat wrote:
| Running an instance isn't expensive. Running an instance with
| 10,000 users might be, but you don't have to have lots of users.
| I run an instance and I can and do easily communicate with lots
| of other people on other instances without much effort at all.
|
| I'd say that I've managed to find more people, with less effort
| who share some of the same interests as me and honestly I don't
| know which instance they are on because it didn't matter. Using
| hashtags to find content that you like, following a handfull of
| people and suddenly your feed comes alive.
|
| Perhaps we should stop teating users like morons. Sure it's
| different but people learn.
| jwmoz wrote:
| A solution for developers built by developers. Should have
| thought of the end user first.
| hinkley wrote:
| News flash: tech and fads change constantly on the internet.
| Almost everything is "doomed".
| actionfromafar wrote:
| As far as hosting costs per user go, I think the Mastodon
| software could be implemented in a much more efficient manner.
| There are already alternative, working proof-of-concepts which
| are much leaner.
|
| As far moderation, that's a harder thing to handle. Don't know
| really.
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