25 ms·

This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take

This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move. Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the admin(s) and move on. You think this shows a disadvantage compared to twitter? Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will. How will your argument hold up when f*c*book finishes dying? We'll find out soon enough. Or how about when a telecoms/media conglomerate buys out flickr or tumblr and puts a stake through their heart? Oh, that already happened. This is a bittersweet testament to exactly how the Internet should be built: on the foundations of openness, community and decentralisation.

cmeacham98 4y ago
Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.
- Taek 4y ago
  In some sense of the word they are already shut down. Moderation is very heavy on both and certain topics just can't become widely shared. For example, a recent thread by a sex worker had something like 8/30 tweets censored off the platform (despite none of the content being graphic, offensive, or illegal). So sure, Twitter will run for a long time. But it doesn't have very strong guarantees to its users about how it will treat them or what content will be allowed.
  - afavour 4y ago
    > In some sense of the word they are already shut down. C'mon. Let's call a spade as spade: you wanted to complain about moderation and you shoehorned it into conversation. In no way does it make Twitter "shut down".
  - EarlKing 4y ago
    Neither does any point on the Fediverse. As long as operators think they can run their site any way they want instead of obeying a common protocol then they're federated in name only. To put it another way: If I can never trust that my email will make it to someone on gmail due to the opaqueness of their spam filters, with no way to be whitelisted by a recipient, then email has been thoroughly decommoditized and centralized... and so too a 'federated' system where operators set arbitrary rules that result in whatever server they don't like being unreachable.
    - wizzwizz4 4y ago
      Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a pain sometimes.
      - tekknik 4y ago
        > Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. Wait, where have we heard this before? Oh right, Bitcoin and mining. It won’t be run by small time users if it catches traction. Not techies goofing around on the weekend, but when your Grandma creates an account because her friend is on there.
      - EarlKing 4y ago
        "Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain obscene conduct. I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.
        deleted 4y ago
- EarlKing 4y ago
  I'll just butt in at this point to note that 'federated' systems are more or less FidoNet and Usenet warmed over, neither of which managed to overtake commercial systems, and in the latter case was rendered useless by spam... much like Mastodon and friends which are rendered useless by racism and porn. Speaking of which... there's supposed to be a Mastodon Server Covenant(tm)(c)(pat. pending) in regards to such matters, but the https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant where it's supposed to be documented is 404. Looks like it was quietly removed sometime after August of this year. In any case I'll make a prediction: Mastodon will remain a haven for people too racist and/or porn-obsessed for even Twitter and Reddit to tolerate and adoption will be hampered accordingly.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    >racism and porn. That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.
    - remram 4y ago
      And let's not act like Twitter isn't full of those to this day...
      - thrown_22 4y ago
        They're getting rid of the porn ... so people are leaving.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      Now that Reddit is very respectable, we're supposed to pretend that it wasn't started as normie 4chan, even ripping off naming subsections like naked directories, just like every imageboard. A normie 4chan that got lucky by existing when digg decided to commit suicide.
      - paganel 4y ago
        Not sure about the intentions of the reddit founders, to be honest, but at the beginning there were no subsections and the like. When they did show up they were implemented as sub-domains, for example http://programming.reddit.com http://programming.reddit.com . I can't exactly remember how much that lasted, but it was for more than a couple of months (I'd say for at least half a year) before the directory-thing was implemented.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  Where is your myspace page?
- qznc 4y ago
  Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_have_experience_with_google_or_the/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
  - loceng 4y ago
    "... the indie RPG scene laments its demise." Where did they move?
    - noasaservice 4y ago
      Sometimes when communities die or are killed, they don't come back. Nobody knows where to go to re-convene.
      - voakbasda 4y ago
        This should part of a plan for online organizational continuity. Any community that uses big tech’s services should probably have one.
      - remram 4y ago
        This is different because mastodon.technology will keep operating until December 1st. This leaves them plenty of time to organize a move by discussing it on the platform like they always have. They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.
        dredmorbius 4y ago
        One of the huge problems with on-platform discussions is ... that the discussion itself dies with the platform, and any decisions or announcements disappear with it. At the same time, based on my own personal experience, it is absolutely impossible to get people to move to another platform or service even for the purpose of discussing future plans. My exceedingly strong advice is to have multiple points of presence defined as a matter of course, one of which should be a simple email list (which provides persistent contact information), regardless of any awareness of an impending platform shutdown.
- j_k_eter 4y ago
  I find the idea that X won't / can't happen on a 3 month timeline, in this political climate, silly. Is there such a thing as stability bias? Because folks had best recalibrate their expectations for rate of change, starting a few months ago. I won't be taking any bets on Facebook, but the thing I'm replying to sounds like 6-months ago thinking.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Depends if X is a tool/cause/symptom of the political climate you are talking about. Because Twitter is, so I think I side with the guy that said it’s silly to think it’ll shut down soon.
  - mynameisvlad 4y ago
    I mean if you’re saying human existence can’t be guaranteed 3 months into the future, then that’s one thing, but what does Facebook and Twitter’s stability have to do with the current political climate? And if you are saying the former, then Twitter and Facebook’s longetivity should be the least of your concerns.
    - m3kw9 4y ago
      Funny you say that, the chance of nuclear war is the highest since the Cuban missile crisis.
      - mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Which is why I said what I said. If the “political climate” were to affect the longetivity of Facebook, Twitter et al, then their longetivity is the least of our concerns because it would imply something much more disastrous has happened. I personally couldn’t care less that there’s no Facebook around when I’m living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape due to the “political climate”.
  - banku_brougham 4y ago
    Great point. Not long ago, it was not commonly imagined that large nuclear reactors anywhere in the world would be on the border of moving front lines between warring armored forces. People aren't great at imagining how things can change.
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  f*c*book has been floundering for some years now and is lurching from trying to follow one trend to the next, pouring money into each attempt and everything twitter seems to do causes another exodus. They'll be brought out and then hollowed out, or attempt a major pivot which will be fatal for their global relevance. This is without the spectre of data protection laws offering us more and more protection from the abuse of these sorts of platforms, having themselves broken up by monopolies, their revenue stream being cut off wholesale by the likes of Apple, investors and big customers finally realising they're paying for bots and I'm sure several other bear traps just waiting for them to stumble into.
  - philippejara 4y ago
    why are you censoring facebook?
    - freedomben 4y ago
      I was wondering that too, and I think my brain may have figured it out. on a quick glance at the way it's written, my brain read "fuckbook" rather than "facebook" since f*c*book aligns with both. If that's right, it's kind of silly IMHO
      - proactivesvcs 4y ago
        It's both silly and a sign of my absolute contempt for them ;-)
      - CRConrad 4y ago
        Both funny and fitting, which makes it a net plus IMO.
- barkingcat 4y ago
  try opening any myspace/google+/orkut/and so on links and you can see this in action.
- ccn0p 4y ago
  OP didn't say anything about timing. Everything comes to an end. The point is that the timing in one case is decided by the users, the other by shareholders.
  - dangus 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
    - ccn0p 4y ago
      great list thanks for sharing. I'm just not sure making grain alcohol in the 15th century applies to a modern day Internet company listed on a public stock exchanges. But time will tell for sure.. it always does!
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  >but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - burntwater 4y ago
    > How will your argument hold up when fcbook finishes dying? We'll find out soon enough. Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.
    - Chris2048 4y ago
      "soon enough" could be a decade relative to the assumption that they'll be around forever.
      - lovich 4y ago
        If you’re going to stretch definitions like that “anytime soon” can go as far. It was a reasonable paraphrase
        Chris2048 4y ago
        If by "stretch" you mean "consider the context", then no, it's an unreasoned paraphrase.
        lovich 4y ago
        Given the context interpreted the original post as implying that the end of those services was in short term timeframe. And apparently so did the poster im defending. That may not have been what the original poster intended but if that’s the case then they should use less ambiguous language.
        4y ago
- petesergeant 4y ago
  That’s true of Facebook, but I can see Twitter receiving a fatal blow if the Musk acquisition goes through.
  - vinaypai 4y ago
    There's a lot to dislike about Elon Musk (mostly related to his lack of filter) but he has founded multiple successful companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars each. It's possible he'll somehow make twitter worse than it is and starts hemorrhaging users, but if I had to choose I'd bet on Twitter ending up in a better place than it is now.
    - petesergeant 4y ago
      Mr Musk is unambiguously both brilliant and a complete ass, and I think people who underestimate him or lionise him are both wrong. That said, I think he is buying Twitter for the lulz / weird libertarian reasons, rather than making a real business out of it, and I have serious concerns it will injure what is currently a public utility absolutely beyond repair.
      - guelo 4y ago
        He's buying it for the same reason all other billionaires buy media outlets, to be able to push their narrative onto the public consciousness. Social media isn't what users post, it's which user posts the algorithm decides to show. For someone with a conglomerate with many interests and huge ambition, owning popular media can be very profitable even if the media outlet itself isn't.
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    Rumors are that he plans to WeChatify twitter under X.com, so there’s more of a chance that twitter gets put under something larger and becomes neighbors with Square.
    - numpad0 4y ago
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. where is soon? And also, do you have a crystal ball to predict the future?
- rakoo 4y ago
  Mastodon will probably die first because it's just a software but that's not a problem: ActivityPub, the protocol, and the Fediverse, the network, will most certainly outlast Twitter. Unless Twitter chooses to get compatible with the Fediverse. A protocol can't die. People are still using IRC, XMPP, good ol' email, decades after they were created. They are still useful, they still work, so there is no reason for them to "die"
  - matthewdgreen 4y ago
    Hey even gopher has 333 unique servers according to a recent census. But for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead.
    - danuker 4y ago
      > for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead. It has a very small community. That is very different from being dead - in fact, that community is probably much more passionate about what makes it specific than a large community. For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.
      - xani_ 4y ago
        > For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter. I'd say ratio of sysadmins to actual users of the service is good indication that something is dead
        meowface 4y ago
        >I'd say ratio of sysadmins to actual users of the service is good indication that something is dead I may steal this quote.
        krmboya 4y ago
        Aren't the sysadmins actual users?
        4y ago
- isaacremuant 4y ago
  You don't know when they will simply decide not to give you access to certain data. Look at email providers who suddenly decided "If you don't use it for X months, you're inactive and I'm deleting everything". It's not about the service existing but people being able to extract and use what they've put in, in 10/20 years.
- otikik 4y ago
  Google Reader T_T
- barkingcat 4y ago
  Once the twitter sale is completed, the new owner of twitter can chose whatever they want to do with it, including shutting it down - which in this milleu would be something that the buyer of twitter will consider doing just for LOL's. imagine the trolling potential of a rolling outage of twitter or ooops "new owner" deleted the database as a joke. Or replace all twitter profiles with sayings from Doge. before you say "this person can't possibly do this" ... think again.
  - systemvoltage 4y ago
    Curious though, mastadadon owners can potentially be like that too, no? And stakes are too low to do mischief with mastadon vs. Twitter.
    - barkingcat 4y ago
      of course! but my reply was to answer "claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable." which is ... truly laughable if you like doge?
    - gnull 4y ago
      Who are mastodon owners?
      - barkingcat 4y ago
        the individual owners/operators of each mastodon instance. there is the mastodon project, but you can fork the code and make your own community if you want more control over your own codebase when it comes to your own mastodon instance
      - warkdarrior 4y ago
        The owners of the Mastodon instances one connects to.
    - 3371 4y ago
      Yes, but why did you ask? I suppose that's exactly one of the reasons why fediverse users want to choose who they trust, isn't it?
- gnull 4y ago
  I wouldn't claim Twitter will shut down soon, but one could argue that mastodon is more robust because it's divirsified. There's no single person on earth who can shut down Mastodon, so Mastodon dies only if this decision is made massively by many people (or if development stops, but then still nothing will stop the server I run on raspberry pi in my bedroom). Twitter otoh can be shut down by one person for a whole multitude of reasons without any concern for the opinion of users.
- EvilMole 4y ago
  I don't think he was saying either Facebook or Twitter is going to close soon. Heck, MySpace is still around. But sooner or later, centralised systems either shut down or become something completely different: think about Tumblr as a good example of that.
- ElevenLathe 4y ago
  These services may not "shut down" but they might change (or have already changed) so much that many would not have signed up knowing what they know now. This is kind of a danger of an open protocol too (for example, IRC users who signed up in 1998 to talk about Britney Spears gossip are probably not well-served by most current IRC networks), but not to the same extent.
- romeros 4y ago
  Orkut was super successful and was eventually shutdown.. Meta will live on forever but facebook might well be a relic of the past. Most people don't even log into facebook anymore than a few times a year.
mdrzn 4y ago
"What will you do when MySpace shuts down?" We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of some users having to move multiple times because the server they are no closed.
- lapcat 4y ago
  Also worth noting that MySpace is still running and though far below peak usage still has millions of monthly visitors, likely more than Mastodon.
- bitL 4y ago
  Well, I shut down my FB page 6 years ago and didn't move anywhere else. The "social network" need died in me already.
monkin 4y ago
And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project adoption. So I do not see any advantage in federated system. It’s cool as technology and all, but completely unprepared for huge traffic or real life scenarios. PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance.
- elikoga 4y ago
  > Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds what, why? The load is hardly that high.
  - madmoose 4y ago
    When the Musk takeover was first announced it was practically impossible to register on many of the most popular Mastodon instances. An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.
  - naavis 4y ago
    For reference, based on quick Googling, Twitter publishes around 10 000 tweets per second on average.
    - 83457 4y ago
      On average I guess that makes sense. The peaks must be ridiculously high though.
      - woevdbz 4y ago
        I'd assume it's not so much the peaks that are a challenge - most of these 10k tweets/second aren't critical to serve to anyone fast, and that scales horizontally- it's the hot spots, that one tweet thread in the spotlight right now that everybody wants to read and jump on - that doesn't scale by just adding more servers
registeredcorn 4y ago
Just as a small nitpick, there is still a community on Flickr. There are certain elements that Photographers get out of Flickr that we don't get from Instagram, or other platforms. This isn't to say that the service is as big or powerful as it once was, but it has done an adequate, if not satisfactory job, at meeting the needs of its base.
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  I did go for the jugular a bit :-) I know a fair few people who were really big Flickr fans back in the day and they lament at how the service has changed, and how its soul was diminished, because of the interests of those who now control it. You're right that it is still a going concern.
- toastal 4y ago
  Very true in comparison to Instagram. Flickr doesn't strip your metadata and color profiles. They allow uploading actual rectangle photos instead of square or square-ish. They don't compress the hell out of the images. They store an original of the upload (great for an archiving failure). There's also more community-building tools even if they're no where near the vibrancy of a decade ago (though the unlimited storage is probably what led to the decline as many folks just dumped everything on it). The biggest beef is everything that comes with it needing to be for-profit and how you can't control the whims of the product owner.
gbro3n 4y ago
Though not a social service, the recent shutdown of Stadia is likely indicative of how corporate shut downs will be handled.
krolden 4y ago
Doesn't at&t already own flkckr by way of yahoo?
- generalpf 4y ago
  SmugMug bought Flickr quite some time ago. https://www.smugmug.com/together/ https://www.smugmug.com/together/
walls 4y ago
It sounds like the only actual advantage is 'you get to keep the same account'? That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care about.
starfallg 4y ago
Closed source dies with the lack of money. Open source dies with the lack of users and attention. The problem is, money buys users. So for FOSS, it's a chicken and egg problem with the interplay of money and eyeballs.
riffic 4y ago
> Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will. Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network... The Fediverse (or Federated Social Web as it was previously referred to in 2007[0] or so when it was first envisioned) will never close. Single installations may, but the network as a whole can not. [0] https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_Social_Web_Lorea_Takes_the_Networks_ https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_So...
- ryanisnan 4y ago
  Wouldn't the answer for most people to "What happens when Twitter shuts down?" be, "Well I'll just move to the next social media site". I don't necessarily hold that opinion, but I get the impression most folks I know do.
  - riffic 4y ago
    people will move to the next social media site (or jump to another medium if it's good enough) even before Twitter shuts down. This happens all the time and there are parallels with other format / medium shifts (Gutenberg invents movable type, newspapers supplanted by news reels at the cinema -> people buy radio receivers -> broadcast television -> cable news -> whatever we have today with our always-on internet connections and services. My main point here is that audiences are fluid, we can respect their intelligence, and they go where the content is.
- krapp 4y ago
  >Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia): It is if people who've decided it's "de facto infrastructure" get their way and the government nationalizes and regulates it. Then we're all stuck with it forever.
  - riffic 4y ago
lovich 4y ago
> f*c*book Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of using M$ Instead of Microsoft? Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling
- CRConrad 4y ago
  No, it seems we're making a little joke: The asterisks don't necessarily have to mean 'a' and 'e', do they? They could be some other letters...
  - lovich 4y ago
    Ah, that completely went over my head
m3kw9 4y ago
Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events, you shouldn’t avoid doing something just because there could be a small chance of death(not walking out side to avoid a meteor strike). Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.
- sam1r 4y ago
  >> Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events. Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example hypothetical “black swan” events?
  - solardev 4y ago
    There's a book called that by Nassim Taleb, about how extremely improbable events can have outsized impacts but can't be easily modeled... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory?wprov=sfti1
  - wolfram74 4y ago
    I feel like the cheeky cop out answer is that since one definition of a black swan event is that no one could see it coming, it's impossible to give examples because then someone saw it coming :p
  - csa 4y ago
    Not op, but…: - Multiple C-suite executives and board members get caught up in a Jeffrey Epstein level underage sex and sex trafficking ordeal. They resist when busted, and it becomes a spectacle. The evidence is just messy enough and the group is just tight-lipped enough that the legal parts of the case take a long time. In the mean time, Twitter loses users who voice their objection via not giving Twitter its attention and moves on to an up-and-coming competitor. - The US elects a group of politicians who have authoritarian leanings (note that these could be extremists from either side of the politic spectrum, imho). This group of people lose power in legitimate elections. Via various levels of chicanery that revolve around undermining the spirit if not the law around the US election system, this group makes it so that they are able remain in power. Once they’ve started down that slippery slope, they just rewrite the laws so that they stay in power permanently. This group clamps down on free speech. The powers that be at Twitter object. A puppet leader loyal to the leading party is installed in order to manage Twitter out of existence, with a state-controlled competitor being supported in its place. - The US is successfully overtaken in war by another country. The powers that be at Twitter allow for speech against the occupiers. Twitter is shut down. - Twitter is found to have facilitated genocide in a foreign country (e.g., Myanmar), and the public revolts. To be honest, this will probably be overlooked, but I thought I would put it here as a thought exercise. Part of the problem with hypothetical black swan events is that they seem entirely impossible… until they happen. That’s why they are black swan events.
swyx 4y ago
what exactly happens to all the URLs that were linking to mastodon addresses? surely those are now going to die?
mfer 4y ago
> This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. People who aren't looking to make a profit (or even break even) means they are running a social media platform while funding it through some other means. What is that means of making money? What pays for the hosting and the time spent doing ops? You can't take money out of the equation because you have hosting costs at the least. How are things funded and why that way should be a conversation. Anything that ignores money ignores the reality of operating something on the Internet. That means it's not sustainable.
- otikik 4y ago
  There’s lots of space between “not doing things for profit” and “not caring about money”.
- teraflop 4y ago
  "Trying to be self-funding" and "trying to make a profit" are very different things, and it doesn't make sense to conflate them. Even though funding wasn't the primary focus of this blog post, it seems to make it quite clear where the money was coming from: https://www.patreon.com/ashfurrow https://www.patreon.com/ashfurrow
  - mfer 4y ago
    Money was obviously an issue. $319 USD/month didn't cover the costs of running it. As noted in the post, "I’ve donated countless hours". Where is the line between "trying to make a profit" and "trying to be self-funding"? Trying to be funded off of donations is really hard and rarely works. Most of the time you need other funding models. If someone runs a biz where they run mastadon instances and the business breaks even (or just a little more) is that making a profit? How does an organization behind an instance make money to cover expenses? This has to be looked at.
philosopher1234 4y ago
Why not consider twitter, Facebook, tumblr as decentralized instances of social media? Why build decentralization into the tech instead of having decentralization through multiple companies existing? A real community is being destroyed here, even though other similar ones exist
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
corobo 4y ago
Can you copy your toots across yet? Last I heard you can only migrate profile which seems a bit.. well I can do that by hand in 10 minutes E: called them tweets
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  You are correct. There is currently an open issue[0] requesting support for migrating posts, that was opened in 2019 and unsurprisingly has some comments from today pointing out how useful such a feature would be. [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
- kixiQu 4y ago
  To be clear, when you move accounts, your old server will notify the servers of all the people who follow you such that they will silently be updated to following your new account. This is not something you can do yourself at all; you can contact all of those people and tell them about your new account, but then they'd have to take action to follow it.
micromacrofoot 4y ago
Myspace still hasn't shut down
yieldcrv 4y ago
> Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the admin(s) and move on. I'm understanding that the data is gone and you're bragging about the observation that the protocol still functions? I'm not sure this is an aspect any of us care about? I think we can all observe that a common interface for posting and interacting with people will remain and that no corporation right now can unilaterally change that. I don't think pointing that out in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone is a strength.
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone Oh, is that what this thread is about? Who says it is?
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    You answered a question with a question. So is the answer that I'm misunderstanding, or is the answer that I'm understanding correctly. Are the ramifications that I highlighted true in either case, or false?
sedatk 4y ago
All in all, it doesn't mean much. Mastodon makes the domain part of your ID, so moving to another server isn't different than, say, moving to Twitter. Even if it's possible to move your existing content, it doesn't have significant value on an ephemeral timeline. You might as well save your backups and keep going. Mastodon might be able to force your followers to follow your new account, but AFAIK it doesn't do that either for reasons I don't know. That would've been cool.
- dane-pgp 4y ago
  Mastodon does inform your followers when your account moves[0], but unfortunately doesn't allow you to automatically migrate your existing posts over to your new account.[1] [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8003 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8003 [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
  - sedatk 4y ago
    That's not much different than informing your followers with your new Twitter profile link, is it?
woah 4y ago
This article is replete with examples of the weaknesses of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. > This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do. I’ve donated countless hours to running the instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and I’ve always put the instance above my own needs. But I can’t put the instance above the needs of my family. > Why Not Transfer to a New Admin? > Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with. The ideal inherent in federated systems- "people will use servers run by their anarchist commune's sysadmin" breaks down in real life. Nobody actually has a personal anarchist sysadmin to run their mastodon instance for them. In absence of this, the servers in federated systems are run by strangers on the internet who foolishly volunteer themselves for a huge amount of unpaid work, and who you just have to hope are going to be responsible with user's data. This is why the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of the blockchain world has been so much more successful. The first thing they figured out was how to reward people running the servers, and how to make it so you don't have to trust them. It's a viable, expanding system, and with improvements to scalability and privacy, it will handle decentralized social media as well.
HellsMaddy 4y ago
Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? This has always confused me and is part of the reason I haven't started using it, I couldn't decide on which instance to use. Why can't an account be globally unique and not tied to a specific instance? Why, as a user, do I have to deal with the low-level concept of an instance? Is this all just a consequence of keeping user data private-ish? I understand the data has to be stored somewhere, and if user data were distributed to the entire network, it obviously wouldn't be private. Couldn't e2e + public key encryption be used to work around this somehow?
- somat 4y ago
  because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then becomes why can't you change your name? and it has mainly to do with avoiding name conflicts in administratively isolated systems. A major problem in distributed systems is names. one solution is to do what dns did, you can have nice names but you only get to pick them under the part of the hierarchy you control. another solution is to do what git or ipfs does. nobody gets useful names but at least you don't need any sort of central name database. mastodon went the dns/email route, which makes sense people want nice names. but now your name is stuck on your domain. perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns. Off tangent opinion on names in a federated system. Unfortunately mastodon adopted the twitter style "@user" but because this only make sense in the context of a single domain mastodon mainly uses the awkward form "@user@domain" I think the email/xmpp form "user@domain" would have been better, but if they felt the @ prefix was critical to the experience of a twitter like micro blog than they probably should have adopted the form "@user.domain"
  - KirillPanov 4y ago
    > because that is your identity That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
I always wondered when twitter is ultimately shuttered if they will hand off (at least all the public facing) tweet to some place like the the library of congress for historical purposes.
forgotpwd16 4y ago
>This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. And one of the weaknesses of a decentralized model compared to a distributed one.

cmeacham98 4y ago

Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.

Taek 4y ago
In some sense of the word they are already shut down. Moderation is very heavy on both and certain topics just can't become widely shared. For example, a recent thread by a sex worker had something like 8/30 tweets censored off the platform (despite none of the content being graphic, offensive, or illegal). So sure, Twitter will run for a long time. But it doesn't have very strong guarantees to its users about how it will treat them or what content will be allowed.
- afavour 4y ago
  > In some sense of the word they are already shut down. C'mon. Let's call a spade as spade: you wanted to complain about moderation and you shoehorned it into conversation. In no way does it make Twitter "shut down".
- EarlKing 4y ago
  Neither does any point on the Fediverse. As long as operators think they can run their site any way they want instead of obeying a common protocol then they're federated in name only. To put it another way: If I can never trust that my email will make it to someone on gmail due to the opaqueness of their spam filters, with no way to be whitelisted by a recipient, then email has been thoroughly decommoditized and centralized... and so too a 'federated' system where operators set arbitrary rules that result in whatever server they don't like being unreachable.
  - wizzwizz4 4y ago
    Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a pain sometimes.
    - tekknik 4y ago
      > Unlike email, the Fediverse hasn't been captured by a few large organisations. So long as we take measures to ensure that this doesn't happen, "go somewhere else" will always be a viable solution to complaints about an instance's moderation. Wait, where have we heard this before? Oh right, Bitcoin and mining. It won’t be run by small time users if it catches traction. Not techies goofing around on the weekend, but when your Grandma creates an account because her friend is on there.
    - EarlKing 4y ago
      "Go somewhere else" isn't a solution when a plurality of servers agree to tolerate racist, sexist, or just plain obscene conduct. I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.
      - deleted 4y ago
EarlKing 4y ago
I'll just butt in at this point to note that 'federated' systems are more or less FidoNet and Usenet warmed over, neither of which managed to overtake commercial systems, and in the latter case was rendered useless by spam... much like Mastodon and friends which are rendered useless by racism and porn. Speaking of which... there's supposed to be a Mastodon Server Covenant(tm)(c)(pat. pending) in regards to such matters, but the https://joinmastodon.org/covenant https://joinmastodon.org/covenant where it's supposed to be documented is 404. Looks like it was quietly removed sometime after August of this year. In any case I'll make a prediction: Mastodon will remain a haven for people too racist and/or porn-obsessed for even Twitter and Reddit to tolerate and adoption will be hampered accordingly.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >racism and porn. That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.
  - remram 4y ago
    And let's not act like Twitter isn't full of those to this day...
    - thrown_22 4y ago
      They're getting rid of the porn ... so people are leaving.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Now that Reddit is very respectable, we're supposed to pretend that it wasn't started as normie 4chan, even ripping off naming subsections like naked directories, just like every imageboard. A normie 4chan that got lucky by existing when digg decided to commit suicide.
    - paganel 4y ago
      Not sure about the intentions of the reddit founders, to be honest, but at the beginning there were no subsections and the like. When they did show up they were implemented as sub-domains, for example http://programming.reddit.com http://programming.reddit.com . I can't exactly remember how much that lasted, but it was for more than a couple of months (I'd say for at least half a year) before the directory-thing was implemented.
thrown_22 4y ago
Where is your myspace page?
qznc 4y ago
Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise. Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_have_experience_with_google_or_the/.compact https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...
- loceng 4y ago
  "... the indie RPG scene laments its demise." Where did they move?
  - noasaservice 4y ago
    Sometimes when communities die or are killed, they don't come back. Nobody knows where to go to re-convene.
    - voakbasda 4y ago
      This should part of a plan for online organizational continuity. Any community that uses big tech’s services should probably have one.
    - remram 4y ago
      This is different because mastodon.technology will keep operating until December 1st. This leaves them plenty of time to organize a move by discussing it on the platform like they always have. They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        One of the huge problems with on-platform discussions is ... that the discussion itself dies with the platform, and any decisions or announcements disappear with it. At the same time, based on my own personal experience, it is absolutely impossible to get people to move to another platform or service even for the purpose of discussing future plans. My exceedingly strong advice is to have multiple points of presence defined as a matter of course, one of which should be a simple email list (which provides persistent contact information), regardless of any awareness of an impending platform shutdown.
j_k_eter 4y ago
I find the idea that X won't / can't happen on a 3 month timeline, in this political climate, silly. Is there such a thing as stability bias? Because folks had best recalibrate their expectations for rate of change, starting a few months ago. I won't be taking any bets on Facebook, but the thing I'm replying to sounds like 6-months ago thinking.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Depends if X is a tool/cause/symptom of the political climate you are talking about. Because Twitter is, so I think I side with the guy that said it’s silly to think it’ll shut down soon.
- mynameisvlad 4y ago
  I mean if you’re saying human existence can’t be guaranteed 3 months into the future, then that’s one thing, but what does Facebook and Twitter’s stability have to do with the current political climate? And if you are saying the former, then Twitter and Facebook’s longetivity should be the least of your concerns.
  - m3kw9 4y ago
    Funny you say that, the chance of nuclear war is the highest since the Cuban missile crisis.
    - mynameisvlad 4y ago
      Which is why I said what I said. If the “political climate” were to affect the longetivity of Facebook, Twitter et al, then their longetivity is the least of our concerns because it would imply something much more disastrous has happened. I personally couldn’t care less that there’s no Facebook around when I’m living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape due to the “political climate”.
- banku_brougham 4y ago
  Great point. Not long ago, it was not commonly imagined that large nuclear reactors anywhere in the world would be on the border of moving front lines between warring armored forces. People aren't great at imagining how things can change.
proactivesvcs 4y ago
f*c*book has been floundering for some years now and is lurching from trying to follow one trend to the next, pouring money into each attempt and everything twitter seems to do causes another exodus. They'll be brought out and then hollowed out, or attempt a major pivot which will be fatal for their global relevance. This is without the spectre of data protection laws offering us more and more protection from the abuse of these sorts of platforms, having themselves broken up by monopolies, their revenue stream being cut off wholesale by the likes of Apple, investors and big customers finally realising they're paying for bots and I'm sure several other bear traps just waiting for them to stumble into.
- philippejara 4y ago
  why are you censoring facebook?
  - freedomben 4y ago
    I was wondering that too, and I think my brain may have figured it out. on a quick glance at the way it's written, my brain read "fuckbook" rather than "facebook" since f*c*book aligns with both. If that's right, it's kind of silly IMHO
    - proactivesvcs 4y ago
      It's both silly and a sign of my absolute contempt for them ;-)
    - CRConrad 4y ago
      Both funny and fitting, which makes it a net plus IMO.
barkingcat 4y ago
try opening any myspace/google+/orkut/and so on links and you can see this in action.
ccn0p 4y ago
OP didn't say anything about timing. Everything comes to an end. The point is that the timing in one case is decided by the users, the other by shareholders.
- dangus 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_oldest_companies
  - ccn0p 4y ago
    great list thanks for sharing. I'm just not sure making grain alcohol in the 15th century applies to a modern day Internet company listed on a public stock exchanges. But time will tell for sure.. it always does!
SkyMarshal 4y ago
>but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- burntwater 4y ago
  > How will your argument hold up when fcbook finishes dying? We'll find out soon enough. Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.
  - Chris2048 4y ago
    "soon enough" could be a decade relative to the assumption that they'll be around forever.
    - lovich 4y ago
      If you’re going to stretch definitions like that “anytime soon” can go as far. It was a reasonable paraphrase
      - Chris2048 4y ago
        If by "stretch" you mean "consider the context", then no, it's an unreasoned paraphrase.
        lovich 4y ago
        Given the context interpreted the original post as implying that the end of those services was in short term timeframe. And apparently so did the poster im defending. That may not have been what the original poster intended but if that’s the case then they should use less ambiguous language.
        4y ago
petesergeant 4y ago
That’s true of Facebook, but I can see Twitter receiving a fatal blow if the Musk acquisition goes through.
- vinaypai 4y ago
  There's a lot to dislike about Elon Musk (mostly related to his lack of filter) but he has founded multiple successful companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars each. It's possible he'll somehow make twitter worse than it is and starts hemorrhaging users, but if I had to choose I'd bet on Twitter ending up in a better place than it is now.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    Mr Musk is unambiguously both brilliant and a complete ass, and I think people who underestimate him or lionise him are both wrong. That said, I think he is buying Twitter for the lulz / weird libertarian reasons, rather than making a real business out of it, and I have serious concerns it will injure what is currently a public utility absolutely beyond repair.
    - guelo 4y ago
      He's buying it for the same reason all other billionaires buy media outlets, to be able to push their narrative onto the public consciousness. Social media isn't what users post, it's which user posts the algorithm decides to show. For someone with a conglomerate with many interests and huge ambition, owning popular media can be very profitable even if the media outlet itself isn't.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  Rumors are that he plans to WeChatify twitter under X.com, so there’s more of a chance that twitter gets put under something larger and becomes neighbors with Square.
  - numpad0 4y ago
ekianjo 4y ago
> but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. where is soon? And also, do you have a crystal ball to predict the future?
rakoo 4y ago
Mastodon will probably die first because it's just a software but that's not a problem: ActivityPub, the protocol, and the Fediverse, the network, will most certainly outlast Twitter. Unless Twitter chooses to get compatible with the Fediverse. A protocol can't die. People are still using IRC, XMPP, good ol' email, decades after they were created. They are still useful, they still work, so there is no reason for them to "die"
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  Hey even gopher has 333 unique servers according to a recent census. But for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead.
  - danuker 4y ago
    > for all practical purposes it's pretty much dead. It has a very small community. That is very different from being dead - in fact, that community is probably much more passionate about what makes it specific than a large community. For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.
    - xani_ 4y ago
      > For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter. I'd say ratio of sysadmins to actual users of the service is good indication that something is dead
      - meowface 4y ago
        >I'd say ratio of sysadmins to actual users of the service is good indication that something is dead I may steal this quote.
      - krmboya 4y ago
        Aren't the sysadmins actual users?
      - 4y ago
isaacremuant 4y ago
You don't know when they will simply decide not to give you access to certain data. Look at email providers who suddenly decided "If you don't use it for X months, you're inactive and I'm deleting everything". It's not about the service existing but people being able to extract and use what they've put in, in 10/20 years.
otikik 4y ago
Google Reader T_T
barkingcat 4y ago
Once the twitter sale is completed, the new owner of twitter can chose whatever they want to do with it, including shutting it down - which in this milleu would be something that the buyer of twitter will consider doing just for LOL's. imagine the trolling potential of a rolling outage of twitter or ooops "new owner" deleted the database as a joke. Or replace all twitter profiles with sayings from Doge. before you say "this person can't possibly do this" ... think again.
- systemvoltage 4y ago
  Curious though, mastadadon owners can potentially be like that too, no? And stakes are too low to do mischief with mastadon vs. Twitter.
  - barkingcat 4y ago
    of course! but my reply was to answer "claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable." which is ... truly laughable if you like doge?
  - gnull 4y ago
    Who are mastodon owners?
    - barkingcat 4y ago
      the individual owners/operators of each mastodon instance. there is the mastodon project, but you can fork the code and make your own community if you want more control over your own codebase when it comes to your own mastodon instance
    - warkdarrior 4y ago
      The owners of the Mastodon instances one connects to.
  - 3371 4y ago
    Yes, but why did you ask? I suppose that's exactly one of the reasons why fediverse users want to choose who they trust, isn't it?
gnull 4y ago
I wouldn't claim Twitter will shut down soon, but one could argue that mastodon is more robust because it's divirsified. There's no single person on earth who can shut down Mastodon, so Mastodon dies only if this decision is made massively by many people (or if development stops, but then still nothing will stop the server I run on raspberry pi in my bedroom). Twitter otoh can be shut down by one person for a whole multitude of reasons without any concern for the opinion of users.
EvilMole 4y ago
I don't think he was saying either Facebook or Twitter is going to close soon. Heck, MySpace is still around. But sooner or later, centralised systems either shut down or become something completely different: think about Tumblr as a good example of that.
ElevenLathe 4y ago
These services may not "shut down" but they might change (or have already changed) so much that many would not have signed up knowing what they know now. This is kind of a danger of an open protocol too (for example, IRC users who signed up in 1998 to talk about Britney Spears gossip are probably not well-served by most current IRC networks), but not to the same extent.
romeros 4y ago
Orkut was super successful and was eventually shutdown.. Meta will live on forever but facebook might well be a relic of the past. Most people don't even log into facebook anymore than a few times a year.

mdrzn 4y ago

"What will you do when MySpace shuts down?" We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of some users having to move multiple times because the server they are no closed.

lapcat 4y ago
Also worth noting that MySpace is still running and though far below peak usage still has millions of monthly visitors, likely more than Mastodon.
bitL 4y ago
Well, I shut down my FB page 6 years ago and didn't move anywhere else. The "social network" need died in me already.

monkin 4y ago

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project adoption. So I do not see any advantage in federated system. It’s cool as technology and all, but completely unprepared for huge traffic or real life scenarios. PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance.

elikoga 4y ago
> Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds what, why? The load is hardly that high.
- madmoose 4y ago
  When the Musk takeover was first announced it was practically impossible to register on many of the most popular Mastodon instances. An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.
- naavis 4y ago
  For reference, based on quick Googling, Twitter publishes around 10 000 tweets per second on average.
  - 83457 4y ago
    On average I guess that makes sense. The peaks must be ridiculously high though.
    - woevdbz 4y ago
      I'd assume it's not so much the peaks that are a challenge - most of these 10k tweets/second aren't critical to serve to anyone fast, and that scales horizontally- it's the hot spots, that one tweet thread in the spotlight right now that everybody wants to read and jump on - that doesn't scale by just adding more servers

registeredcorn 4y ago

Just as a small nitpick, there is still a community on Flickr. There are certain elements that Photographers get out of Flickr that we don't get from Instagram, or other platforms. This isn't to say that the service is as big or powerful as it once was, but it has done an adequate, if not satisfactory job, at meeting the needs of its base.

proactivesvcs 4y ago
I did go for the jugular a bit :-) I know a fair few people who were really big Flickr fans back in the day and they lament at how the service has changed, and how its soul was diminished, because of the interests of those who now control it. You're right that it is still a going concern.
toastal 4y ago
Very true in comparison to Instagram. Flickr doesn't strip your metadata and color profiles. They allow uploading actual rectangle photos instead of square or square-ish. They don't compress the hell out of the images. They store an original of the upload (great for an archiving failure). There's also more community-building tools even if they're no where near the vibrancy of a decade ago (though the unlimited storage is probably what led to the decline as many folks just dumped everything on it). The biggest beef is everything that comes with it needing to be for-profit and how you can't control the whims of the product owner.

gbro3n 4y ago

Though not a social service, the recent shutdown of Stadia is likely indicative of how corporate shut downs will be handled.

krolden 4y ago

Doesn't at&t already own flkckr by way of yahoo?

generalpf 4y ago
SmugMug bought Flickr quite some time ago. https://www.smugmug.com/together/ https://www.smugmug.com/together/

walls 4y ago

It sounds like the only actual advantage is 'you get to keep the same account'? That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care about.

starfallg 4y ago

Closed source dies with the lack of money. Open source dies with the lack of users and attention. The problem is, money buys users. So for FOSS, it's a chicken and egg problem with the interplay of money and eyeballs.

riffic 4y ago

> Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will. Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_networking_services https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network... The Fediverse (or Federated Social Web as it was previously referred to in 2007[0] or so when it was first envisioned) will never close. Single installations may, but the network as a whole can not. [0] https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_Social_Web_Lorea_Takes_the_Networks_ https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_So...

ryanisnan 4y ago
Wouldn't the answer for most people to "What happens when Twitter shuts down?" be, "Well I'll just move to the next social media site". I don't necessarily hold that opinion, but I get the impression most folks I know do.
- riffic 4y ago
  people will move to the next social media site (or jump to another medium if it's good enough) even before Twitter shuts down. This happens all the time and there are parallels with other format / medium shifts (Gutenberg invents movable type, newspapers supplanted by news reels at the cinema -> people buy radio receivers -> broadcast television -> cable news -> whatever we have today with our always-on internet connections and services. My main point here is that audiences are fluid, we can respect their intelligence, and they go where the content is.
krapp 4y ago
>Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia): It is if people who've decided it's "de facto infrastructure" get their way and the government nationalizes and regulates it. Then we're all stuck with it forever.
- riffic 4y ago

lovich 4y ago

> f*c*book Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of using M$ Instead of Microsoft? Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling

CRConrad 4y ago
No, it seems we're making a little joke: The asterisks don't necessarily have to mean 'a' and 'e', do they? They could be some other letters...
- lovich 4y ago
  Ah, that completely went over my head

m3kw9 4y ago

Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events, you shouldn’t avoid doing something just because there could be a small chance of death(not walking out side to avoid a meteor strike). Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.

sam1r 4y ago
>> Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events. Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example hypothetical “black swan” events?
- solardev 4y ago
  There's a book called that by Nassim Taleb, about how extremely improbable events can have outsized impacts but can't be easily modeled... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory?wprov=sfti1
- wolfram74 4y ago
  I feel like the cheeky cop out answer is that since one definition of a black swan event is that no one could see it coming, it's impossible to give examples because then someone saw it coming :p
- csa 4y ago
  Not op, but…: - Multiple C-suite executives and board members get caught up in a Jeffrey Epstein level underage sex and sex trafficking ordeal. They resist when busted, and it becomes a spectacle. The evidence is just messy enough and the group is just tight-lipped enough that the legal parts of the case take a long time. In the mean time, Twitter loses users who voice their objection via not giving Twitter its attention and moves on to an up-and-coming competitor. - The US elects a group of politicians who have authoritarian leanings (note that these could be extremists from either side of the politic spectrum, imho). This group of people lose power in legitimate elections. Via various levels of chicanery that revolve around undermining the spirit if not the law around the US election system, this group makes it so that they are able remain in power. Once they’ve started down that slippery slope, they just rewrite the laws so that they stay in power permanently. This group clamps down on free speech. The powers that be at Twitter object. A puppet leader loyal to the leading party is installed in order to manage Twitter out of existence, with a state-controlled competitor being supported in its place. - The US is successfully overtaken in war by another country. The powers that be at Twitter allow for speech against the occupiers. Twitter is shut down. - Twitter is found to have facilitated genocide in a foreign country (e.g., Myanmar), and the public revolts. To be honest, this will probably be overlooked, but I thought I would put it here as a thought exercise. Part of the problem with hypothetical black swan events is that they seem entirely impossible… until they happen. That’s why they are black swan events.

swyx 4y ago

what exactly happens to all the URLs that were linking to mastodon addresses? surely those are now going to die?

mfer 4y ago

> This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. People who aren't looking to make a profit (or even break even) means they are running a social media platform while funding it through some other means. What is that means of making money? What pays for the hosting and the time spent doing ops? You can't take money out of the equation because you have hosting costs at the least. How are things funded and why that way should be a conversation. Anything that ignores money ignores the reality of operating something on the Internet. That means it's not sustainable.

otikik 4y ago
There’s lots of space between “not doing things for profit” and “not caring about money”.
teraflop 4y ago
"Trying to be self-funding" and "trying to make a profit" are very different things, and it doesn't make sense to conflate them. Even though funding wasn't the primary focus of this blog post, it seems to make it quite clear where the money was coming from: https://www.patreon.com/ashfurrow https://www.patreon.com/ashfurrow
- mfer 4y ago
  Money was obviously an issue. $319 USD/month didn't cover the costs of running it. As noted in the post, "I’ve donated countless hours". Where is the line between "trying to make a profit" and "trying to be self-funding"? Trying to be funded off of donations is really hard and rarely works. Most of the time you need other funding models. If someone runs a biz where they run mastadon instances and the business breaks even (or just a little more) is that making a profit? How does an organization behind an instance make money to cover expenses? This has to be looked at.

philosopher1234 4y ago

Why not consider twitter, Facebook, tumblr as decentralized instances of social media? Why build decentralization into the tech instead of having decentralization through multiple companies existing? A real community is being destroyed here, even though other similar ones exist

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

corobo 4y ago

Can you copy your toots across yet? Last I heard you can only migrate profile which seems a bit.. well I can do that by hand in 10 minutes E: called them tweets

dane-pgp 4y ago
You are correct. There is currently an open issue[0] requesting support for migrating posts, that was opened in 2019 and unsurprisingly has some comments from today pointing out how useful such a feature would be. [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
kixiQu 4y ago
To be clear, when you move accounts, your old server will notify the servers of all the people who follow you such that they will silently be updated to following your new account. This is not something you can do yourself at all; you can contact all of those people and tell them about your new account, but then they'd have to take action to follow it.

micromacrofoot 4y ago

Myspace still hasn't shut down

yieldcrv 4y ago

> Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the admin(s) and move on. I'm understanding that the data is gone and you're bragging about the observation that the protocol still functions? I'm not sure this is an aspect any of us care about? I think we can all observe that a common interface for posting and interacting with people will remain and that no corporation right now can unilaterally change that. I don't think pointing that out in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone is a strength.

CRConrad 4y ago
> in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone Oh, is that what this thread is about? Who says it is?
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  You answered a question with a question. So is the answer that I'm misunderstanding, or is the answer that I'm understanding correctly. Are the ramifications that I highlighted true in either case, or false?

sedatk 4y ago

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

dane-pgp 4y ago
Mastodon does inform your followers when your account moves[0], but unfortunately doesn't allow you to automatically migrate your existing posts over to your new account.[1] [0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8003 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8003 [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
- sedatk 4y ago
  That's not much different than informing your followers with your new Twitter profile link, is it?

woah 4y ago

This article is replete with examples of the weaknesses of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. > This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do. I’ve donated countless hours to running the instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and I’ve always put the instance above my own needs. But I can’t put the instance above the needs of my family. > Why Not Transfer to a New Admin? > Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with. The ideal inherent in federated systems- "people will use servers run by their anarchist commune's sysadmin" breaks down in real life. Nobody actually has a personal anarchist sysadmin to run their mastodon instance for them. In absence of this, the servers in federated systems are run by strangers on the internet who foolishly volunteer themselves for a huge amount of unpaid work, and who you just have to hope are going to be responsible with user's data. This is why the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of the blockchain world has been so much more successful. The first thing they figured out was how to reward people running the servers, and how to make it so you don't have to trust them. It's a viable, expanding system, and with improvements to scalability and privacy, it will handle decentralized social media as well.

HellsMaddy 4y ago

Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? This has always confused me and is part of the reason I haven't started using it, I couldn't decide on which instance to use. Why can't an account be globally unique and not tied to a specific instance? Why, as a user, do I have to deal with the low-level concept of an instance? Is this all just a consequence of keeping user data private-ish? I understand the data has to be stored somewhere, and if user data were distributed to the entire network, it obviously wouldn't be private. Couldn't e2e + public key encryption be used to work around this somehow?

somat 4y ago
because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then becomes why can't you change your name? and it has mainly to do with avoiding name conflicts in administratively isolated systems. A major problem in distributed systems is names. one solution is to do what dns did, you can have nice names but you only get to pick them under the part of the hierarchy you control. another solution is to do what git or ipfs does. nobody gets useful names but at least you don't need any sort of central name database. mastodon went the dns/email route, which makes sense people want nice names. but now your name is stuck on your domain. perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns. Off tangent opinion on names in a federated system. Unfortunately mastodon adopted the twitter style "@user" but because this only make sense in the context of a single domain mastodon mainly uses the awkward form "@user@domain" I think the email/xmpp form "user@domain" would have been better, but if they felt the @ prefix was critical to the experience of a twitter like micro blog than they probably should have adopted the form "@user.domain"
- KirillPanov 4y ago
  > because that is your identity That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

I always wondered when twitter is ultimately shuttered if they will hand off (at least all the public facing) tweet to some place like the the library of congress for historical purposes.

forgotpwd16 4y ago

>This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. And one of the weaknesses of a decentralized model compared to a distributed one.