13 ms·

Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

brodouevencode 4y ago
NOW this is of concern. Is this more backlash talk or an honest thought? If the latter why just now and not six months ago?
- jerf 4y ago
  I don't think there's any need to hide from this. For a while, all the major social networks were run by people who all felt politically much the same way. That has now faded, and it will probably never come back. So people who also felt that way politically feel the need to take greater actions to take control of their social media presence. While I do not align with these people politically, I applaud their desires and encourage them to continue taking action to own smaller spaces instead of us all trying to fight over the monolithic centralized large spaces. As I've said several times on HN now, I am not particularly convinced in the long term that massive centralized communities are practical because the intersection of all community social norms is essentially the null set, or at the very least, much smaller than anyone wants to be confined to. The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
  - brodouevencode 4y ago
    > is essentially the null set Perhaps, philosophically speaking of course, this is not such a bad thing? Maybe societal change should be slow and deliberate. > The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated. This is a good point that I have not yet considered directly, just through one-off rantings about how everything tech for the longest time was Valley-centered. I can't help but think that a shift away is a good thing long term.
- hash07e 4y ago
  Because…. Narratives?
badwolf 4y ago
That way everyone can subscribe to your company's professional toots on masto
- KindAndFriendly 4y ago
  Exactly. Same way how people can subscribe to a company's Twitter account. Except that the company owns the content, server, and can define their own rules.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    I think your parent was trying to point out how "toots" and "masto" are at odds with the professional image many companies try to present.
    - roywashere 4y ago
      I also hate ‘toot’ and find it very awkward and much prefer if people just would refer to it as a ‘message’
- MBCook 4y ago
  Why did they have to choose “toot”? I know different instances can re-label it but… ouch. I know people made fun of “tweet” but it was a logical and neutral word.
  - simongray 4y ago
    A "tweet" is no less logical and neutral than a "toot" (a Mastodon making a sound with its trunk). You're just used to the word "tweet".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
Arubis 4y ago
Those of you with experience running a Mastodon/ActivityPub server and sales chops, now's the time to start cold calling all your local news outlets and offering to take their money.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
Not trivial. Slack/teams are built to handle confidential communications with legal oversight.
- rakoo 4y ago
  The fediverse is not about confidential communications though
- ownagefool 4y ago
  I'm not sure this is the case. Like sure, slack / teams can see all your data, but if you have a trivial problem such as being in the EU, you suddenly now have a compliance problem if specific data gets put on the service. Run mattermost on your own server and many of the problems go away. Mastodon is a bit different because it's federated, but I assume since it's more akin to a social network, it's similar to running a community support website compliance wise.
- sdiacom 4y ago
  I don't think the suggestion is for Mastodon to replace internal communication, but to use it as a social media outlet for your organization.
  - MBCook 4y ago
    Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim. But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not. Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake. It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the government. Seems like a good idea to me. And if you like federation it sounds better than a semi-official instance everyone uses that verifies things, sort of recreating a mini-Twitter “super” instance that is “more equal” than the others.
    - rambambram 4y ago
      Can't a domain name, webserver and email address do the same thing? Or am I missing something?
danhon 4y ago
I wrote about this as well, about a week and a half ago: https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/4230/ https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/4230/
valboa 4y ago
- dr-detroit 4y ago
- sdiacom 4y ago
  If you read the other articles they've written about Mastodon lately, they make it clear that it's not Elon Musk owning Twitter, but Mastodon increasing in popularity, that motivated them to write about Mastodon. This post is as neutral of a discussion of Mastodon as it could get. I don't see how this post could be read as relating to identity politics or diversity/inclusion.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  They're also not serious about it. Decentralization is a "disinformation specialist's" nightmare, because people might be able to say things to other people that couldn't be edited or deleted by third parties. That being said, I'd be overjoyed if the Fediverse took off over this. There's just not a chance in hell, because it's a worst case scenario for the three-letter agencies and the administration that are pushing this outrage. Just the observation of how aggressive they've become over Musk's ownership, a guy who's completely in thrall to government insider cash, tells you that they wouldn't tolerate a competitive, mainstream Mastodon for a second. This is just trashing the company as an indication that they can destroy the company. A company that Musk vastly overpaid for, so now is stuck with the obligation to make profitable. Making Twitter profitable was probably always impossible. An intense government push could easily destroy it. That's why he's explicitly aligning with Republicans, who can't attack Musk without alienating their base.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
grzes 4y ago
why is hacker-news flooded lately with mastodon-related content? it's irritating
- wizzwizz4 4y ago
  Because Twitter is. It's even worse on the Fediverse, which is flooded with both Mastodon- and Twitter-related discussion.
  - addajones 4y ago
    It's quite annoying honestly.
- cma 4y ago
  Because Twitter is now being monetized like a free dating app. Pay to boost.
- jimnotgym 4y ago
  Because a rich man recently bought Twitter, because he felt some people were managing to avoid what he says. Some people think that it would be nice to find somewhere else to hang out
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Yeah, those people don't actually try to avoid what the rich man says - they wouldn't have anything to be upset about otherwise. I mean, join Mastodon and see what's trending on Fediverse - it's the constant "rich man did this", "rich man did that", non stop, ad nauseam, for months now. No, it's about a whole beehive of drama queens who thought Twitter is their domain, who saw their hated rich man prove them wrong by literally buying it from under them.
- KindAndFriendly 4y ago
  I see your point. At the same time, - imho - it is exciting to see how we might witness the beginning of an eruption in the established social media landscape.
sneak 4y ago
No organization wants to do this, unfortunately. Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money, made more expensive by the choice in the Mastodon design to not support virtual hosting on a per-domain basis. You have to run (and admin) a complete new instance of Mastodon for each domain you wish to support.
- KindAndFriendly 4y ago
  Yes, as others mentioned, there will be hosting providers doing this for companies. The big upside is that you truly own the content and define your rules. I assume the costs for running a larger Mastodon instance are trivial compared to how much it costs to run ads on Twitter.
  - unicornporn 4y ago
    > as others mentioned, there will be hosting providers doing this for companies. https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
- gpm 4y ago
  Hey look, a major organization doing this: https://social.network.europa.eu/about https://social.network.europa.eu/about It would be really really nice if it was easier for small organizations. For big organizations they're already in the business of running their own websites and this isn't anything new.
  - unicornporn 4y ago
    Hey, another one! https://social.bund.de/explore https://social.bund.de/explore
  - sneak 4y ago
    I don’t think most big organizations run their own webservers.
    - gpm 4y ago
myth_drannon 4y ago
The writer of the article works for Thoughtworks. Do they offer consulting services related to Fediverse?
vsareto 4y ago
Fair warning about this Mastodon behavior that can lead to embarrassment/leaks as new people start to use it: https://mastodon.social/@mmasnick/109299348553543784 https://mastodon.social/@mmasnick/109299348553543784
- latchkey 4y ago
  Well, that seems like a spammers paradise. Hey, did you hear about this amazing product @insertYourNameHere?
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    Less so than you might think: 1. DMs can be restricted to followed profiles. 2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair. 3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot. I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message.
    - latchkey 4y ago
      > on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message. True, it is hilarious to consider that $8 will disincentive spammers.
      - dredmorbius 4y ago
        $8 re-upped for each instance of rapidly-burned account will likely discourage low-return spam, at least. That's more-or-less the principle Metafilter's based on, and it's worked for a few decades. (MeFi's fee is $5, not $8.)
- kurisufag 4y ago
  this isn't a unique problem for the Fediverse. sometime in ~2018, Mastodon (IIRC -- it might have been a specific instance) implemented inter-user messaging over ActivityPub, showing users only messages addressed to them -- since it wasn't actually part of the spec, the rest of the Fediverse saw them as regular feed messages. Mastodon users assumed DMs were private and got burned, other instance operators were all of a sudden flooded with non-post messages, and everything was generally pretty suck-y until everyone got their shit together. this sort of thing happens periodically (see: Gab's federation flooding the network in a similar way), it's a consequence of different entities trying to develop individual features over a unifying protocol.
mberning 4y ago
If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon rather than their genuine belief that federation is the right way forward. After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.
- jefftk 4y ago
  Social media is better when the people you want to interact with are there, so when everyone else is moving is an unusually good time to move.
  - Levitz 4y ago
    Hopefully we at least learn that "build your own social network" was never a reasonable point.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    Indeed. The network effect. I got onto Mastodon in May just to check it out. It was pretty sleepy in that there weren't a lot of people I was following on twitter on mastodon. In the last couple of weeks that's begun to change rapidly. I think we're nearing a tipping point.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    If everyone is moving. The problem with the network effects is that it is very hard to compete. It is kind of the experience with Parler. If 5% of users are extremists and leave twitter for [new platform] and another 5% of users are moderate and do the same, [new platform] ends up with 50% extremist, 50% moderate, and the moderate users won't stick around for very long. I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.
anderspitman 4y ago
Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone. In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new selfhosting server. You have apps for Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, calendars, whatever. The key pieces missing are simple tunneling services (think ngrok with a GUI designed for selfhosters), easier domain name management, and porting apps to run on phones. The most difficult is the last one but I'm hopeful that virtualization will take care of that in the near future[0], and maybe things like Wasm in the long run. EDIT: PS - If you're interested in making this world a reality, join us over at https://forum.indiebits.io/ https://forum.indiebits.io/ [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has_kvm_on_by_default_and_i_finally_got_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has...
- dmonitor 4y ago
  Is Tailscale not good enough for a simple tunneling service?
  - anderspitman 4y ago
    Tailscale is awesome. One of my two favorite companies alongside fly.io. But these are tools built for sysadmins and developers. Selfhosting needs tools built for the masses.
  - alexb_ 4y ago
    What's a tunneling service? Do I need to use that before I can make a Mastodon account? What app is that on - wait, there are "instances", what the hell is that? Screw it, this is too complicated - I'm going back to twitter.
    - anderspitman 4y ago
      I completely agree. Which is why tunneling should be built-in to having a domain name. It should be easier than a phone number. You buy a domain from a domain seller and pay them $5/mo to provide tunneling. All the user needs to understand is: * I install the app * App requests access to your domain so it can set up appname.yourdomain.com * I grant permission and we're live.
ngrilly 4y ago
Is there any Mastodon managed hosting where you can bring your own domain, a bit like Fastmail but for Mastodon?
- Arubis 4y ago
  https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ but they're rate-limiting new signups due to demand.
  - ngrilly 4y ago
    Just found that article about them but you beat me at it :) https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodon https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodo...
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  There's a list of providers and other suggestions here: <https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_instance%3F https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...>
emp_ 4y ago
You see it meme'd relentlessly about the concept of having "fuck you money" and the crazy things one could do. Well, it finally happened in a undisputable, greatest possible example kinda way, and now everyone is scrambling to adjust.
- EricE 4y ago
  Hardly everyone. Just a vocal minority. The vast majority of whom will be back on Twitter and paying the $8. Don't believe me? Let's just come back in six months and check.
seydor 4y ago
people have asked for this for years. Would be great if it happens, but it s actually suspicious that suddenly everyone wants people to do that and that this narrative is pushed by the media.
phailhaus 4y ago
> How do you connect to millions of people without using Facebook or Twitter? Oh interesting! Let me check out their instance that they linked to: "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com" > This is a Mastodon instance solely for employees of Thoughtworks. Whoops! In general, I don't see how this helps a company at all to reach the millions of users that they could through Facebook or Twitter. On those platforms, it's automatic and immediate. On Mastodon, it seems like you have to actively court users one at a time? Because ThoughtWorks wasn't even able to reach me, and I read their entire article. I went directly to their instance and learned nothing. EDIT: Aha! It turns out that the landing page is a red herring, and you can still click through to the "See What's Happening" page. I don't see how a non-technical user would figure this out and not get immediately discouraged. Linking to the /public page would have made a lot more sense.
- CJefferson 4y ago
  Yes, I am imagine their email server is also just for their employees. What's your point?
  - phailhaus 4y ago
    They literally link it at the end of the article with "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com" On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?
    - robotresearcher 4y ago
      Here's their public feed, linked from that page. https://toot.thoughtworks.com/public https://toot.thoughtworks.com/public
      - phailhaus 4y ago
        Oh man, it took me so long to figure out how you got there. This is dead-on-arrival for nontechnical users.
incomingpain 4y ago
Mastodon back in 2019 had a grand opportunity to set themselves up for success; they made the wrong decision. If they had made the correct decision in 2019; they could have in 2020 doubled down on the correct decision during the hunter biden laptop conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Mastodon will forever remain nothing because of this decision. Mastodon has no nazis, it does have that going for them. https://www.vice.com/en/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twitter-without-nazis-so-why-are-we-not-using-it https://www.vice.com/en/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twit...
- rcfox 4y ago
  You refer to some mysterious "decision" they made, but what was it? (I know you've included a link, but it's such a long op-ed with no summary and it doesn't immediately mention decision making, so I don't feel like there's a guarantee of a pay off from reading it.)
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >You refer to some mysterious "decision" they made, but what was it? I tried to keep less specific because it doesn't matter to a great deal. We both lack a tardis and cannot change the past. https://archive.ph/0JFR9 https://archive.ph/0JFR9 I'm not a gab user, I got an awesome username but it's a shitty echo chamber worse than anywhere else. Fundamentally "Gab" forked mastodon because masotodon banned them off the fediverse. But more importantly mastodon made it clear they do not represent free speech and have the ability to remove political opponents. There's tons of speech on GAB and what percentage is 'hate speech'? can you even define hate speech really? It's not all speech on the platform. The correct way to read the blog is they banned their political opponents because they have free speech policies. This was a huge mistake for mastodon. Something they can basically never recover from. One of the persistent issues in political polarization has been labelling your political opponents. Republicans are all nazis?
nemo44x 4y ago
This is such backwards thought. You don't want to make your social network presence a place people have to go to. You want your presence to be where people go to. Centralized social networks give people who publish content massive audience potential. Running your own Website for this completely misses the point and you might as well just add a forum to your site.
- ahelwer 4y ago
  It is very funny watching people here not think about how federation works and then, instead of considering they might be missing something, go on a diatribe about how the way they imagined things work in their head doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly fine not knowing how federation works! Just... be humble enough not to immediately issue strongly-worded judgements about things you don't understand.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Actually, no. Since Mastodon is federated, running your own instance is largely transparent to most Mastodon and Fediverse users. You're simply another profile on another instance. Content will federate. What operating your own server does provide is: 1. Control over your own services. Notably, over what other instances can federate to it --- Adam Davidson (ex of New Yorker, NYT, NPR, etc.) discovered this yesterday: <https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377 https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377>. But also moderation and content policies as well as operational and provisioning decisions. 2. An additional indicia of who you really are. BigCo@FlippantMastodonInstance.Whatevs might or might not indicate strong branding. BigCo@BigCo.TLD (especially where BigCo.TLD is already strongly established) is stronger branding. 3. For those not yet using Mastodon, the self-hosted server will be a single point at which content can be viewed. Note that this is marked distinction from the practice of the past decade or so of relying on social media services which were effectively walled gardens: Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and the like. 4. DMs are visible to an instance's admin. Self-hosting means that the organisation would control that particular exposure as well. Much as BigCo would be expected to operate or present its own website or blog, and frequently its own email server (or at least domains pointed at hosted services), so too with self-hosted Mastodon.
taylodl 4y ago
The Disney company should heed this device and call their server(s) Mousetodon. I think they'd kill it. Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. They could even have different servers for different sets of fanbases to focus on - Marvel, Star Wars, etc.
- NegativeK 4y ago
  > Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. God, please, fuck no.
  - taylodl 4y ago
    :) I'm just pointing out how ridiculous it is to think every organization should be running their own Mastodon server!
aml702 4y ago
mgraczyk 4y ago
I believe for internal communication, Twitter style social networks are a net bad. At Facebook we used a facebook-esque product called Workplace for this sort of thing. I believe it harmed the culture because people would chase clout and visibility on the social network instead of doing real work. Social networks encourage that kind of behavior. I think slack, discord, or similarly un-networked products are a better fit for company communication. Anything that shows "follower counts" is probably not good for companies.
chatterhead 4y ago
- hojjat12000 4y ago
  Mastodon Mafia? Please enlighten us.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > it's clearly doing so through manipulated voting No, people really want Mastodon and decentralization to succeed, and people have really been whipped into a frenzy about Elon enough to be terrified about the future and hopeful about Mastodon as an alternative. No voting manipulation necessary.
haunter 4y ago
Well maybe one day my workplace will have its own masto and finally I can toot in my office
- gorkish 4y ago
  Back in the 80's there were a lot of workplaces that had their own toot and you could masto in your office.
parentheses 4y ago
“open source communities” are mostly good for topic oriented communities. otherwise, i believe commercial motivations are great for maximizing participation. in the end communities with maximum participation will always be where creators are incentivized to be. until the average user becomes willing to pay for X, ad based revenue models will always win. relatedly, paying for X is easier than setting up your own mastodon server.
MikusR 4y ago
Don't forget to block the "bad" servers.
adhoc_slime 4y ago
I must be missing something, all I'm seeing on Mastodon is people talking about Mastodon and Musk and Twitter. Its even more insufferable than the twitter discourse right now.
hdesh 4y ago
Maybe Mastodon already handles many of the following concerns. However I can imagine any organization would go through a series of questions before they start running their own server: 1. How much does it cost? 2. Who does it benefit? 3. Who takes the ownership of the deployment? 4. If something needs to be fixed with the deployment, who does that? 5. Why should I prefer this over say slack/teams, where I get support bundled in my contract? 6. What happens if someone puts up something nasty on the internal mastodon network? The legal department hates this one weird trick. 7. Does it create a headache for the HR department if people start violating their corporate code of conduct on the mastodon network? Maybe I am pessimistic, but OP is probably being quite dreamy here.
c7b 4y ago
Ok, but how large does the organization need to be for that to make sense, or how do you determine that? I was recently brainstorming some ideas with a friend who has a 1-person business where it would make sense for clients to be able to connect with each other. The thought of Mastodon briefly crossed my mind, but it seemed too ambitious.

NOW this is of concern. Is this more backlash talk or an honest thought? If the latter why just now and not six months ago?

jerf 4y ago
I don't think there's any need to hide from this. For a while, all the major social networks were run by people who all felt politically much the same way. That has now faded, and it will probably never come back. So people who also felt that way politically feel the need to take greater actions to take control of their social media presence. While I do not align with these people politically, I applaud their desires and encourage them to continue taking action to own smaller spaces instead of us all trying to fight over the monolithic centralized large spaces. As I've said several times on HN now, I am not particularly convinced in the long term that massive centralized communities are practical because the intersection of all community social norms is essentially the null set, or at the very least, much smaller than anyone wants to be confined to. The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated.
- brodouevencode 4y ago
  > is essentially the null set Perhaps, philosophically speaking of course, this is not such a bad thing? Maybe societal change should be slow and deliberate. > The fact that all of the major sites sourced from a particular geographical location with particular dominant political beliefs was a historical anomaly that won't be replicated. This is a good point that I have not yet considered directly, just through one-off rantings about how everything tech for the longest time was Valley-centered. I can't help but think that a shift away is a good thing long term.
hash07e 4y ago
Because…. Narratives?

badwolf 4y ago

That way everyone can subscribe to your company's professional toots on masto

KindAndFriendly 4y ago
Exactly. Same way how people can subscribe to a company's Twitter account. Except that the company owns the content, server, and can define their own rules.
- jefftk 4y ago
  I think your parent was trying to point out how "toots" and "masto" are at odds with the professional image many companies try to present.
  - roywashere 4y ago
    I also hate ‘toot’ and find it very awkward and much prefer if people just would refer to it as a ‘message’
MBCook 4y ago
Why did they have to choose “toot”? I know different instances can re-label it but… ouch. I know people made fun of “tweet” but it was a logical and neutral word.
- simongray 4y ago
  A "tweet" is no less logical and neutral than a "toot" (a Mastodon making a sound with its trunk). You're just used to the word "tweet".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Arubis 4y ago

Those of you with experience running a Mastodon/ActivityPub server and sales chops, now's the time to start cold calling all your local news outlets and offering to take their money.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

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

rakoo 4y ago
The fediverse is not about confidential communications though
ownagefool 4y ago
I'm not sure this is the case. Like sure, slack / teams can see all your data, but if you have a trivial problem such as being in the EU, you suddenly now have a compliance problem if specific data gets put on the service. Run mattermost on your own server and many of the problems go away. Mastodon is a bit different because it's federated, but I assume since it's more akin to a social network, it's similar to running a community support website compliance wise.
sdiacom 4y ago
I don't think the suggestion is for Mastodon to replace internal communication, but to use it as a social media outlet for your organization.
- MBCook 4y ago
  Right. Mastodon doesn’t have an equivalent to Twitter’s (old) verification system. So it’s on users to check if each individual is who they claim. But if there is an official CNN Mastodon instance, it’s suddenly real easy to see if someone claiming to be a CNN reporter is real or not. Are they @john.smith@cnn.news? If not they’re a fake. It would also work for official Microsoft accounts or Colgate-Palmolive or the government. Seems like a good idea to me. And if you like federation it sounds better than a semi-official instance everyone uses that verifies things, sort of recreating a mini-Twitter “super” instance that is “more equal” than the others.
  - rambambram 4y ago
    Can't a domain name, webserver and email address do the same thing? Or am I missing something?

danhon 4y ago

I wrote about this as well, about a week and a half ago: https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/4230/ https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/4230/

valboa 4y ago

dr-detroit 4y ago
sdiacom 4y ago
If you read the other articles they've written about Mastodon lately, they make it clear that it's not Elon Musk owning Twitter, but Mastodon increasing in popularity, that motivated them to write about Mastodon. This post is as neutral of a discussion of Mastodon as it could get. I don't see how this post could be read as relating to identity politics or diversity/inclusion.
pessimizer 4y ago
They're also not serious about it. Decentralization is a "disinformation specialist's" nightmare, because people might be able to say things to other people that couldn't be edited or deleted by third parties. That being said, I'd be overjoyed if the Fediverse took off over this. There's just not a chance in hell, because it's a worst case scenario for the three-letter agencies and the administration that are pushing this outrage. Just the observation of how aggressive they've become over Musk's ownership, a guy who's completely in thrall to government insider cash, tells you that they wouldn't tolerate a competitive, mainstream Mastodon for a second. This is just trashing the company as an indication that they can destroy the company. A company that Musk vastly overpaid for, so now is stuck with the obligation to make profitable. Making Twitter profitable was probably always impossible. An intense government push could easily destroy it. That's why he's explicitly aligning with Republicans, who can't attack Musk without alienating their base.
bfgoodrich 4y ago

grzes 4y ago

why is hacker-news flooded lately with mastodon-related content? it's irritating

wizzwizz4 4y ago
Because Twitter is. It's even worse on the Fediverse, which is flooded with both Mastodon- and Twitter-related discussion.
- addajones 4y ago
  It's quite annoying honestly.
cma 4y ago
Because Twitter is now being monetized like a free dating app. Pay to boost.
jimnotgym 4y ago
Because a rich man recently bought Twitter, because he felt some people were managing to avoid what he says. Some people think that it would be nice to find somewhere else to hang out
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Yeah, those people don't actually try to avoid what the rich man says - they wouldn't have anything to be upset about otherwise. I mean, join Mastodon and see what's trending on Fediverse - it's the constant "rich man did this", "rich man did that", non stop, ad nauseam, for months now. No, it's about a whole beehive of drama queens who thought Twitter is their domain, who saw their hated rich man prove them wrong by literally buying it from under them.
KindAndFriendly 4y ago
I see your point. At the same time, - imho - it is exciting to see how we might witness the beginning of an eruption in the established social media landscape.

sneak 4y ago

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

KindAndFriendly 4y ago
Yes, as others mentioned, there will be hosting providers doing this for companies. The big upside is that you truly own the content and define your rules. I assume the costs for running a larger Mastodon instance are trivial compared to how much it costs to run ads on Twitter.
- unicornporn 4y ago
  > as others mentioned, there will be hosting providers doing this for companies. https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/
gpm 4y ago
Hey look, a major organization doing this: https://social.network.europa.eu/about https://social.network.europa.eu/about It would be really really nice if it was easier for small organizations. For big organizations they're already in the business of running their own websites and this isn't anything new.
- unicornporn 4y ago
  Hey, another one! https://social.bund.de/explore https://social.bund.de/explore
- sneak 4y ago
  I don’t think most big organizations run their own webservers.
  - gpm 4y ago

myth_drannon 4y ago

The writer of the article works for Thoughtworks. Do they offer consulting services related to Fediverse?

vsareto 4y ago

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

latchkey 4y ago
Well, that seems like a spammers paradise. Hey, did you hear about this amazing product @insertYourNameHere?
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Less so than you might think: 1. DMs can be restricted to followed profiles. 2. Abuse can be reported and admins will likely act. Such a spam would be a once-and-done affair. 3. I'd need to check the spec / code, but suspect there's an upper bound on the number of profiles which can be mentioned in a single toot. I'm not saying there's no opportunity for abuse. But on the whole, and on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message.
  - latchkey 4y ago
    > on a cost-benefit assessment for the spammer, there are probably more viable options for spreading a message. True, it is hilarious to consider that $8 will disincentive spammers.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      $8 re-upped for each instance of rapidly-burned account will likely discourage low-return spam, at least. That's more-or-less the principle Metafilter's based on, and it's worked for a few decades. (MeFi's fee is $5, not $8.)
kurisufag 4y ago
this isn't a unique problem for the Fediverse. sometime in ~2018, Mastodon (IIRC -- it might have been a specific instance) implemented inter-user messaging over ActivityPub, showing users only messages addressed to them -- since it wasn't actually part of the spec, the rest of the Fediverse saw them as regular feed messages. Mastodon users assumed DMs were private and got burned, other instance operators were all of a sudden flooded with non-post messages, and everything was generally pretty suck-y until everyone got their shit together. this sort of thing happens periodically (see: Gab's federation flooding the network in a similar way), it's a consequence of different entities trying to develop individual features over a unifying protocol.

mberning 4y ago

If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon rather than their genuine belief that federation is the right way forward. After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.

jefftk 4y ago
Social media is better when the people you want to interact with are there, so when everyone else is moving is an unusually good time to move.
- Levitz 4y ago
  Hopefully we at least learn that "build your own social network" was never a reasonable point.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  Indeed. The network effect. I got onto Mastodon in May just to check it out. It was pretty sleepy in that there weren't a lot of people I was following on twitter on mastodon. In the last couple of weeks that's begun to change rapidly. I think we're nearing a tipping point.
- cm2187 4y ago
  If everyone is moving. The problem with the network effects is that it is very hard to compete. It is kind of the experience with Parler. If 5% of users are extremists and leave twitter for [new platform] and another 5% of users are moderate and do the same, [new platform] ends up with 50% extremist, 50% moderate, and the moderate users won't stick around for very long. I am not sure that a social network full of left-wing activits will be very palatable to the average moderate user.

anderspitman 4y ago

Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone. In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new selfhosting server. You have apps for Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, calendars, whatever. The key pieces missing are simple tunneling services (think ngrok with a GUI designed for selfhosters), easier domain name management, and porting apps to run on phones. The most difficult is the last one but I'm hopeful that virtualization will take care of that in the near future[0], and maybe things like Wasm in the long run. EDIT: PS - If you're interested in making this world a reality, join us over at https://forum.indiebits.io/ https://forum.indiebits.io/ [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has_kvm_on_by_default_and_i_finally_got_a/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has...

dmonitor 4y ago
Is Tailscale not good enough for a simple tunneling service?
- anderspitman 4y ago
  Tailscale is awesome. One of my two favorite companies alongside fly.io. But these are tools built for sysadmins and developers. Selfhosting needs tools built for the masses.
- alexb_ 4y ago
  What's a tunneling service? Do I need to use that before I can make a Mastodon account? What app is that on - wait, there are "instances", what the hell is that? Screw it, this is too complicated - I'm going back to twitter.
  - anderspitman 4y ago
    I completely agree. Which is why tunneling should be built-in to having a domain name. It should be easier than a phone number. You buy a domain from a domain seller and pay them $5/mo to provide tunneling. All the user needs to understand is: * I install the app * App requests access to your domain so it can set up appname.yourdomain.com * I grant permission and we're live.

ngrilly 4y ago

Is there any Mastodon managed hosting where you can bring your own domain, a bit like Fastmail but for Mastodon?

Arubis 4y ago
https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ but they're rate-limiting new signups due to demand.
- ngrilly 4y ago
  Just found that article about them but you beat me at it :) https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodon https://til.simonwillison.net/mastodon/custom-domain-mastodo...
dredmorbius 4y ago
There's a list of providers and other suggestions here: <https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_instance%3F https://joinfediverse.wiki/How_to_host_your_own_Fediverse_in...>

emp_ 4y ago

You see it meme'd relentlessly about the concept of having "fuck you money" and the crazy things one could do. Well, it finally happened in a undisputable, greatest possible example kinda way, and now everyone is scrambling to adjust.

EricE 4y ago
Hardly everyone. Just a vocal minority. The vast majority of whom will be back on Twitter and paying the $8. Don't believe me? Let's just come back in six months and check.

seydor 4y ago

people have asked for this for years. Would be great if it happens, but it s actually suspicious that suddenly everyone wants people to do that and that this narrative is pushed by the media.

phailhaus 4y ago

> How do you connect to millions of people without using Facebook or Twitter? Oh interesting! Let me check out their instance that they linked to: "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com" > This is a Mastodon instance solely for employees of Thoughtworks. Whoops! In general, I don't see how this helps a company at all to reach the millions of users that they could through Facebook or Twitter. On those platforms, it's automatic and immediate. On Mastodon, it seems like you have to actively court users one at a time? Because ThoughtWorks wasn't even able to reach me, and I read their entire article. I went directly to their instance and learned nothing. EDIT: Aha! It turns out that the landing page is a red herring, and you can still click through to the "See What's Happening" page. I don't see how a non-technical user would figure this out and not get immediately discouraged. Linking to the /public page would have made a lot more sense.

CJefferson 4y ago
Yes, I am imagine their email server is also just for their employees. What's your point?
- phailhaus 4y ago
  They literally link it at the end of the article with "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com https://toot.thoughtworks.com" On a blog post about running your own instance to reach millions of users, why does it turn out that their instance is totally locked down and actually not accessible to anyone?
  - robotresearcher 4y ago
    Here's their public feed, linked from that page. https://toot.thoughtworks.com/public https://toot.thoughtworks.com/public
    - phailhaus 4y ago
      Oh man, it took me so long to figure out how you got there. This is dead-on-arrival for nontechnical users.

incomingpain 4y ago

Mastodon back in 2019 had a grand opportunity to set themselves up for success; they made the wrong decision. If they had made the correct decision in 2019; they could have in 2020 doubled down on the correct decision during the hunter biden laptop conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Mastodon will forever remain nothing because of this decision. Mastodon has no nazis, it does have that going for them. https://www.vice.com/en/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twitter-without-nazis-so-why-are-we-not-using-it https://www.vice.com/en/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twit...

rcfox 4y ago
You refer to some mysterious "decision" they made, but what was it? (I know you've included a link, but it's such a long op-ed with no summary and it doesn't immediately mention decision making, so I don't feel like there's a guarantee of a pay off from reading it.)
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >You refer to some mysterious "decision" they made, but what was it? I tried to keep less specific because it doesn't matter to a great deal. We both lack a tardis and cannot change the past. https://archive.ph/0JFR9 https://archive.ph/0JFR9 I'm not a gab user, I got an awesome username but it's a shitty echo chamber worse than anywhere else. Fundamentally "Gab" forked mastodon because masotodon banned them off the fediverse. But more importantly mastodon made it clear they do not represent free speech and have the ability to remove political opponents. There's tons of speech on GAB and what percentage is 'hate speech'? can you even define hate speech really? It's not all speech on the platform. The correct way to read the blog is they banned their political opponents because they have free speech policies. This was a huge mistake for mastodon. Something they can basically never recover from. One of the persistent issues in political polarization has been labelling your political opponents. Republicans are all nazis?

nemo44x 4y ago

This is such backwards thought. You don't want to make your social network presence a place people have to go to. You want your presence to be where people go to. Centralized social networks give people who publish content massive audience potential. Running your own Website for this completely misses the point and you might as well just add a forum to your site.

ahelwer 4y ago
It is very funny watching people here not think about how federation works and then, instead of considering they might be missing something, go on a diatribe about how the way they imagined things work in their head doesn't work. Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly fine not knowing how federation works! Just... be humble enough not to immediately issue strongly-worded judgements about things you don't understand.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Actually, no. Since Mastodon is federated, running your own instance is largely transparent to most Mastodon and Fediverse users. You're simply another profile on another instance. Content will federate. What operating your own server does provide is: 1. Control over your own services. Notably, over what other instances can federate to it --- Adam Davidson (ex of New Yorker, NYT, NPR, etc.) discovered this yesterday: <https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377 https://journa.host/@adamdavidson/109297137123981377>. But also moderation and content policies as well as operational and provisioning decisions. 2. An additional indicia of who you really are. BigCo@FlippantMastodonInstance.Whatevs might or might not indicate strong branding. BigCo@BigCo.TLD (especially where BigCo.TLD is already strongly established) is stronger branding. 3. For those not yet using Mastodon, the self-hosted server will be a single point at which content can be viewed. Note that this is marked distinction from the practice of the past decade or so of relying on social media services which were effectively walled gardens: Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and the like. 4. DMs are visible to an instance's admin. Self-hosting means that the organisation would control that particular exposure as well. Much as BigCo would be expected to operate or present its own website or blog, and frequently its own email server (or at least domains pointed at hosted services), so too with self-hosted Mastodon.

taylodl 4y ago

The Disney company should heed this device and call their server(s) Mousetodon. I think they'd kill it. Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. They could even have different servers for different sets of fanbases to focus on - Marvel, Star Wars, etc.

NegativeK 4y ago
> Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. God, please, fuck no.
- taylodl 4y ago
  :) I'm just pointing out how ridiculous it is to think every organization should be running their own Mastodon server!

aml702 4y ago

mgraczyk 4y ago

I believe for internal communication, Twitter style social networks are a net bad. At Facebook we used a facebook-esque product called Workplace for this sort of thing. I believe it harmed the culture because people would chase clout and visibility on the social network instead of doing real work. Social networks encourage that kind of behavior. I think slack, discord, or similarly un-networked products are a better fit for company communication. Anything that shows "follower counts" is probably not good for companies.

chatterhead 4y ago

hojjat12000 4y ago
Mastodon Mafia? Please enlighten us.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pessimizer 4y ago
> it's clearly doing so through manipulated voting No, people really want Mastodon and decentralization to succeed, and people have really been whipped into a frenzy about Elon enough to be terrified about the future and hopeful about Mastodon as an alternative. No voting manipulation necessary.

haunter 4y ago

Well maybe one day my workplace will have its own masto and finally I can toot in my office

gorkish 4y ago
Back in the 80's there were a lot of workplaces that had their own toot and you could masto in your office.

parentheses 4y ago

“open source communities” are mostly good for topic oriented communities. otherwise, i believe commercial motivations are great for maximizing participation. in the end communities with maximum participation will always be where creators are incentivized to be. until the average user becomes willing to pay for X, ad based revenue models will always win. relatedly, paying for X is easier than setting up your own mastodon server.

MikusR 4y ago

Don't forget to block the "bad" servers.

adhoc_slime 4y ago

I must be missing something, all I'm seeing on Mastodon is people talking about Mastodon and Musk and Twitter. Its even more insufferable than the twitter discourse right now.

hdesh 4y ago

Maybe Mastodon already handles many of the following concerns. However I can imagine any organization would go through a series of questions before they start running their own server: 1. How much does it cost? 2. Who does it benefit? 3. Who takes the ownership of the deployment? 4. If something needs to be fixed with the deployment, who does that? 5. Why should I prefer this over say slack/teams, where I get support bundled in my contract? 6. What happens if someone puts up something nasty on the internal mastodon network? The legal department hates this one weird trick. 7. Does it create a headache for the HR department if people start violating their corporate code of conduct on the mastodon network? Maybe I am pessimistic, but OP is probably being quite dreamy here.

c7b 4y ago

Ok, but how large does the organization need to be for that to make sense, or how do you determine that? I was recently brainstorming some ideas with a friend who has a 1-person business where it would make sense for clients to be able to connect with each other. The thought of Mastodon briefly crossed my mind, but it seemed too ambitious.