16 ms·

The Fediverse is inefficient but that's a good trade-off

276 points by ericblues 4y ago

AustinDev 4y ago
Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.
- smaudet 4y ago
  Makes me wonder if you can even build something like this, if decentralized systems must spend more time filtering junk, on a system which makes it easy to send it, it will always be too easy for malevolent actors to takedown. Unless you can incur a significant cost to these activities, e.g. requiring social capital (burning social capital with e.g. hate/disinformation), or physical (e.g. access requires boxes which cost some small fee and can be blacklisted)... Perhaps some of mastodon inefficient behavior can be leveraged here?
- TulliusCicero 4y ago
  People say that they're not terribly fond of rules until they see what that's actually like, then they decide that perhaps rules aren't so bad after all. It's easy to say that rules are 'censorship' in a vacuum, or when you're just talking with normal people, but when you get people intent on spamming or trolling or harassing, you quickly realize there's a reason human societies basically always end up with rules.
  - arcade79 4y ago
    The problem is centralized rules. Different cultures has different rules. Joining it up to one platform and then enforcing one cultures rules on all the other culture is Not Okay. There are different views on nudity around the world. Nipples are normal where I'm from. There are different views and limitations on speech around the world. There are different views on copyright around the world. What's the term limit? There are different views on what constitutes animal abuse around the world. Try posting about the local bullfights on facebook. Or try posting videos from the cockfight from the cockfighting arena. Different mastodon servers, and heck, maybe different fediverses, will fuel diversity in this regard, without One Set of Rules to Rule them All.
    - TulliusCicero 4y ago
      On some level I agree. However, a huge part of what made Twitter appealing to people is precisely that it was essentially one giant instance, with sort of shared culture and rules. While I think Mastodon is fine for some people, it may not have the same 'global appeal', limiting its ability to really be a Twitter replacement.
- rhn_mk1 4y ago
  Mastodon has censorship tools built in. It's up to instance admins to use them.
- jimbob45 4y ago
  It’s not censorship. It’s the simplicity of the product. Social spaces succeed because they attract interesting people. In general, interesting people have the least amount of time to spend trying to maneuver through spam or wading through Nazi sympathizer/woke leftist posts. The barrier to entry has to be negligible to get the interesting people on board.
  - nagonago 4y ago
    Depends on your definition of interesting people. If you mean celebrities and public figures, I agree that most will probably never join the Fediverse because of the high barrier to entry, although I think there's more to that problem than just a lack of centralized moderation. That said, in my opinion there are plenty of interesting people in the fediverse already. Personally I don't really care if the fediverse is widely adopted by celebrities and public figures or not.
ahMath8 4y ago
The real problem with Fediverse is we’ve already seen how people will use it ala Facebook and Twitter. I don’t get to goto work and engineer essentially the same product 2007 engineered. It’s a rehash of a rehash of an idea that will become another social landfill. Really looking forward to the technology equivalent of another Star Wars or Batman trilogy!
uneekname 4y ago
What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance. Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!
- Kiro 4y ago
  My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.
  - sandyarmstrong 4y ago
    In my circles I'm seeing mass exodus. It's not just the tinkerers and the anarchists. I'm not surprised about the uptake in the open source community, after all I remember identi.ca being a lovely network for GNOME back in the day. But I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts. Sure, many of them are dual-posting. But I still see them interacting directly on Mastodon and not just mirroring their Twitter posts on it. I didn't expect this, but I'm finding it very easy not to use Twitter most of the time. The main exception is friends and family messaging various tweets to each other to share news or laugh about something. So I still have an account, it's still useful, but I'm not scrolling it casually anymore.
    - UncleOxidant 4y ago
      I setup a Mastodon account back in May as sort of "just in case Musk messes it up" insurance. And man, did he ever mess it up - worse & faster than my more pessimistic expectations. However, up until about 3 weeks ago there just weren't that many people to follow on mastodon. But that has changed more rapidly than I would have expected. Now I'm following several interesting people I used to follow on twitter.
    - 4y ago
phoe-krk 4y ago
> (...) the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, (...) This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic. There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Mastodon or its forks. The author mentions these other pieces of software later, but pulling them them as "some part of mastodon" is at best a misnomer. And it's been written about countless times already. See https://bofh.social/notice/APTBaDyBOOvNAzaeqO https://bofh.social/notice/APTBaDyBOOvNAzaeqO for a relatively fresh list.
- xg15 4y ago
  That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned. At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it. Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read, the software seems to be quite influential in shaping the "de-facto standard" client/server API, at least for the "microblogging" part of the Fediverse? Like, in theory, ActivityPub both specifies server/server and client/server interactions - however, the client/server part appears to be "underspecified and barely used" [1, 2]. e.g., AP doesn't say anything about how clients are authenticated or even how they can get notified of incoming messages/activities short of polling. This stuff is all specified in the Mastodon API. So in practice, if I wanted to write a new client app for microblogging on the fediverse, my app would use the Mastodon API, not ActivityPub for reference. Is that correct? Of course in the interest of avoiding centralisation, I'd agree that that's not a good state of affairs. It would be better if there was a real, widely-used standard for client/server and not just what the Mastodon devs think is useful. Though at least they cannot simply make changes to the API without convincing the majority of server admins to adopt those changes. [1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-client-to-server-faq/1941 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-client-to-... [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10520 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10520
csande17 4y ago
Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one person either taking down a post or issuing a network-wide ban, just like on Twitter.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- hnarn 4y ago
  I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.
  - csande17 4y ago
    I was responding to the "human inefficiencies" section of the article, which claims that Mastodon is inherently much more inefficient than Twitter because many different moderators (from different instances) must act on the same post. I don't think that's true in practice.
  - seydor 4y ago
    > it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy
    - davisoneee 4y ago
      If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. You are not electing who goes on the list, but you are electing to follow certain lists implicitly by which instance you join. With mastodon/fediverse, you have a choice of numerous different 'twitters', rather than being stuck with the global twitter decision.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
This reminds me of acoup.blog and his take on subsistence farming as a risk reduction decision. Yes under Roman rule there was more "efficient" farming as some (slave worked) farms began focusing on primary crops for sale. This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere. But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they could have invented the co-op mass farm but the risks were too great - there was not a trade system globally that could guarantee delivery of food stuff X and so it was sensible to not focus your own production on food stuff Y but to grow a little of everything. I think what we are seeing here is Mastodon etc as the response to the risks of centralised but efficient servers - privacy, ads, government monitoring etc.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown without easy boat access because they were worth more than their weight in gold.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    Well 20 miles from a navigable river looks a lot like most of populated Europe and China... But I absolutely take the point - anything that can fit in an online comment is a gross simplification- especially for "farming since invention of agriculture". Also the 20 mile is not a hard limit - it's easy to envisage some kind of system where I grow my cash crops near transport like river or coast, and sell them on a trade network, and you grow different crops further out and bring them not to the river / coast but to me to feed me. That probably will be more efficient but just look at the network of trust and possible disasters required - only very stable politics would allow anything like that - and that stability was rare. China probably had more of that for more of the past 2000 years than anywhere else - and that may be the cause of the invention of the bureaucrat!
peterweyand 4y ago
I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease of use a critical mass of users won't be possible so it won't ever be anything other than a niche product.
- imagineerschool 4y ago
  I have been using it for a while, and it's pretty good. Only people who want to use it are on it. The feeling of community is real.
- wruza 4y ago
  If not a false memory, I have read it for a short while and from what I’ve seen (please excuse my opinion) it is a in a pretty good way a specific community(-es) which is probably not ready for this massive exodus. People of global communities barely understand the concept of lurking and local culture. Even with the obstacles you mentioned there is a chance for Mastodon’s own Eternal September happening. Quoting someone sad Warum retweeten alle aus Twitter? Das ist, als ob man sich von einer toxischen Freundin trennt und dann nur noch von ihr erzählt I hope they can handle it well.
- andreyk 4y ago
  Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a simple hosting service (eg we used MastoHost which made it almost as easy as starting a Slack or Discord) which makes signing up super easy.
  - luckylion 4y ago
molly0 4y ago
I like Mastodon because it reminds me of an earlier and more interesting web. The same people I follow on Twitter I follow on Mastodon and I feel they are being more honest on Mastodon. This might not be true.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  Yes, I'm getting that nostalgia kick and the interactions I was seeking. Getting any of that was an very uphill battle on Twitter.
- dotnet00 4y ago
  I agree, the fediverse seems to be one of the places the "old internet" moved to. But personally I haven't found the waves of Twitter users running from Musk to be part of that. For the most part they seem to be running into the fediverse and expecting the same culture that Twitter had. As these sorts of waves tend to always go, I expect it to either fizzle out or to ruin the culture that everyone prior to them got to enjoy. Although maybe the fediverse will be a bit more resilient to this due to being less centralized.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    Like most things it'll end up being a mix. Some of the people running to Mastodon/AP will leave. Some will stay. It's a net-win for fediverse. But as I've said elsewhere, will not replace Twitter. But the world also doesn't need a Twitter. That kind of single "town square" doesn't work. Can't work. And just attracts blowhards and narcissists. And the world will be better without it.
irusensei 4y ago
I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?
- HollowEyes 4y ago
  I am partially surprised that the reading portal is the same as the authoring one. It would feel better if we had one great feed reader, and an authoring pumping station. The blurred lines makes it more difficult to comprehend as much. Who moderates offshore content?
  - irusensei 4y ago
    > Who moderates offshore content Whoever is in the pilot seat and that’s beautiful. Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps. Also server-wide block done by administrators. If I’m not mistaken the largest mastodon instance is Pawoo.net and that’s basically a japanese board for posting controversial hentai artwork. Pawoo.net is blacklisted from most popular Mastodon servers.
    - amadeuspagel 4y ago
      I'd be surprised to learn that it's blacklisted from any feed readers. That illustrates the usefulness of separating reader app and hosting.
      - irusensei 4y ago
        Pretty sure it happened to Gab nodes. In this case justified (and probably with a bit of push from Apple and Google) but the precedent exists. Slightly related Google blocked Element a few years ago because something posted on a federated instance. I think they strong handed matrix.org to implement moderation on the default servers.
ForHackernews 4y ago
I think this article underestimates the inefficiencies in large, centralized systems where efficiency is not a goal, and incentives are weighted against it. Famously, Facebook's iOS app is over 100 MB[0] and for Android, their engineers hacked the Dalvik VM because they had so many class definitions they were overflowing a 5MB buffer just for the definitions - and then, staggeringly, they bragged about this obscenity.[1] I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app. [0] https://www.cio.com/article/230043/why-is-facebooks-ios-app-so-bloated.html https://www.cio.com/article/230043/why-is-facebooks-ios-app-... [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2013/03/04/android/under-the-hood-dalvik-patch-for-facebook-for-android/ https://engineering.fb.com/2013/03/04/android/under-the-hood...
- ilyt 4y ago
  From what I've seen their datancenter stuff is way more competent >I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app. Uh, of course they are running their own datacenters, they are one of biggest sites on net, outsourcing infrastructure to cloud makes no goddamn sense to them
  - csande17 4y ago
    From my limited experience in Big Tech, these kinds of companies are pretty good at running data centers from the hardware, networking, and low-level OS management perspectives. But their server-side programming/"backend engineering" suffers from a lot of the same problems as their mobile app development. In fact, it's frequently way worse because you can't say anything like "what if someone wants to download our app over a 3G data connection" to get people to cut down on bloat. Overstaffing and ship-the-org-chart syndrome leads to ginormous app bundles on the client and 7000 microservices on the server.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      It does look like many of the "hey, look at what cool things we do in our datacenter level infrastructure" stems from the stuff they run on that being overly complicated.
nyanpasu64 4y ago
I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where you expect anyone on any server to be able to reply to people on another server.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter. Yet of course that doesn't scale well to bigger social discussions, it's way too easy for malicious agents to destroy any chance for sensible wider discussion when there is no moderation present. HN/Reddit-esque "just let people downvote and push the downvoted stuff down" works somewhat in most cases, up until some group decides to vote brigade the conversation, and in wider discussion there is also the problem of "I downvote not because the comment is bad but because it disagrees with me.
  - oaiey 4y ago
    And what is the difference to SMTP? That is literally the decentralized messaging platform which is alive for 40 (?) years and still kicking. There will be problems but there is evidence that it can work.
    - csande17 4y ago
      SMTP being created 40 years ago is probably why it still works today. Just like the telephone network, it has a historical exception from the moral obligation to prevent Bad People from using the network to say harmful or incorrect things. (Section 230 didn't exist back then, so it wasn't clear that that kind of moderation was even legal without taking full responsibility for everything users say.) Mastodon doesn't have this kind of exception, so it suffers from a lot of conflict about who exactly the Bad People are and whether accepting messages from them causes you to become a Bad Person yourself.
dbrgn 4y ago
"My honey would cost over €10 a jar if I'd pay my time." Locally made honey (i.e. not from South America) in Switzerland usually costs significantly more than 10€ :)
- berkes 4y ago
  Author here. I did not go into this, but it really is a problem that I, and most of my fellow hobby beekeepers undercharge. That we don't count our hours into the price means that the few Beekeepers who do it professionally, have a hard time charging proper prices. So I'm happy to hear Swiss prices are better. Though, having lived and worked there a summer, I guess it's still relatively cheap. The price of a coffee....
overlisted 4y ago
TLDR: Calling self-hosting inefficient is like calling homegrown food inefficient.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
I'm not sure I accept the premise. I can imagine it being both more efficient and just better in various measures as well. For starters just the ads and trackers must have a cost, which is paid on every visit. As we've seen many times on the internet, cacheable content can be far more efficient than constantly updated content that needs refetched just to show you an ad impression. Google's web page speed tools will warn you about Google Ads non-cachable JS tracker. Combine that with the incentive to show growth in 'user' metrics, which encourages both leniency on bots and intentionally addictive designs for non-bots and I can see an obvious case for twitter being less efficient.
supermatt 4y ago
Why does every instance need a copy of posted assets? Is that really the case?
- gfaster 4y ago
  I believe the problem is server load. You want each server to listen and send updates to the federated feed, and forward the federated feed to the users of that instance. What you want to avoid is a celebrity on instance A posting and then users all over the fediverse pinging instance A to get that post. Instead, instance A sends the post to the fediverse and then for any given user to view the post, they ping their own instance. That allows server requirements to be more closely tied with the number of accounts on it and how heavily they use it rather than the popularity of any given account. Additionally, it makes it so servers only have to interact with their own users and other federated servers. Of course the downside to this is that as the fediverse as a whole grows, the volume of the federated firehose increases, which still increases the minimum requirements (processing power, bandwidth, and storage alike). There may be middle grounds here. For example, the instance I'm on (I have no idea how common this is) stores text posts from other servers but images from are not saved, it's the originating server that serves those. Additionally, there may be the possibility of deleting old posts from the fediverse that don't have any local replies, or something like that. There are issues with the latter, especially with old friends-only posts becoming impossible to access by looking at the public profile on the original server, but I could see that being solved by something like generating a readonly token for the other server or something like that.
doener 4y ago
I think the author idealizes a bit strongly here. Internet infrastructure is not a garden, so I don't think the metaphor fits. And the exponentially growing requirements for hardware and power consumption are at least a real challenge - although certainly not as extreme as with proof-of-work blockchains.
- cinntaile 4y ago
  What does this have to do with blockchains?
  - xigoi 4y ago
    That the energy consumption of Mastodon is negligible in comparison.
    - cinntaile 4y ago
      I took the car to the store, it's not great but it's not as wasteful as proof-of-work blockchains. What is the point of making irrelevant comparisons is what I'm asking.
- berkes 4y ago
  I really tried to convey your exact point. That gardening is inneffient. That I'm probably spending more CO2 because I have a rake. My neighbor buys a rake. The other neighbor buys one, etc. All with a footprint. That farmer producing millions of zucchinis probably has one rake. A tiny footprint, compared . But energy and Co2 make the article even more convoluted. Bitcoin (PoW) even more so. And there's a major difference. In which PoW deliberately burns energy. Whereas the fediverse at least tries to burn as little as possible while remaining decentralized.
azangru 4y ago
> And so is the case with the fediverse. The six million users would "easily" fit on a mastodon on under thirty (virtual) servers, a very few large PostgreSQL database servers and a single file-server/storage. I know, because I've built and grown such Rails systems, with millions of users (on AWS). Certainly not thousands of servers. Definitely not thousands of database-servers. > Even if Mastodon were to be rewritten in Rust, tuned, and changed into a backend that can host thousands of users on a single Raspberry-Pi running on solar power, it still is inefficient. For one, because that backend would be even more efficient when employed in a centralized setup. And secondly because there is a lot of network overhead. Reading these two paragraphs, I was struck by how similar it is to the argument against proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, only with the oppozite conclusions. Look how wasteful, they will say, look how inefficient, and slow, and non-green it is. It's rare to hear someone argue that yes, a technology is wasteful, and it is a good thing.
mlindner 4y ago
Won't this just end up in the situation that the far right stays on Parler and the far left goes to Mastodon? Sounds like Twitter will end up a happier place without the extremists.
- haunter 4y ago
  Pretty much. You can already see the ideological lines laid down on Mastodon
its-summertime 4y ago
thought experiment: Write a twitter clone for a moderately sized community, lets say 10k with probably, 1-5% of community active at any given time. hell, even throw in activitypub if you want. vs. Write twitter. I know which I'd rather do! Only one of the two is easier than rocket science! (haha) Its inefficient because it hasn't needed to be efficient, but that will change in the future or someone else'll take over. Cascade issues are fixable. the end result is proven achievable (see telcos and the SMS systems that cover the world, global scale federated messaging exists and works!)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
VonGuard 4y ago
Standards can fix this stuff: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/ Spritely is an effort to fix the problems that remain with ActivityPub.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  > Spritely is an effort to fix the problems that remain with ActivityPub. If that's true, then your single sentence does more to communicate what Spritely wants to do than that entire website. Even searching for occurrences of "ActivityPub" on the site with Google¹ returns mostly 404s. It sure does not appear to be a living concern. ¹ https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aspritely.institute+%22activityPub%22&oq=site%3Aspritely.institute+%22activityPub%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aspritely.institute+%2...
carapace 4y ago
Whenever you hear the words "efficient" or "inefficient" you should always have in the fore of your mind the question "For what goal?" or in other words "By what metric?" A lot can hide in the unspoken assumptions behind the unqualified use of the idea of efficiency. In this case the comparison of "efficiency" of Twitter vs. Mastodon is pretty meaningless. There are as many goals as there are users and moderators and (in Twitter's case) management and investors, eh? Of course, there are broad groupings and shared interests, but by and large the folks using Twitter and/or Mastodon have different goals. It reminds me of comparisons between industrial farming and small-scale ecological farming: industrial farming is more efficient at creating massive amounts of some kinds of products, but it literally cannot produce any of some other kinds of products. (E.g. you can't get Alpine strawberries in the supermarket because they start to lose structural integrity the very moment you pick them. The only way to get them is to grow them close to your kitchen.) - - - - As a bit of a tangent, I like to reflect how evolution has no goals therefore speaking of the efficiency of living systems is meaningless. Evolution is a chemical tautology.
kazinator 4y ago
Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search. When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results. For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago. If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get nothing. BUT: if I use the URL <domain>/tags/lisp, bam: recent stuff appears! On either instance. The same if I see the hash tag in a post and click on it. Users are going to join Mastodon and try to use the search box to find content related to their interests, and falsely conclude that there is nothing, or next to nothing. That is going to cause some nonzero user attrition. It's not just a problem for tags like #lisp, but mainstream things like #kids, #parenting, #dogs, what have you. My home instance comes up with nothing for any of these searches, with or without hash. Not quite; for "dogs" it finds a user named "Elon Musk F___s Dogs" as its only search result.
- geek_at 4y ago
  for me as a server admin I hate how incredibly annoying it is to set up a new instance. Even the docker setup is very poorly explained (as in not at all in the official documentation) and there are so many subsystems needed for the setup. There are many third party setup guides but most are so outdated that they don't work anymore It's not self contained and after running an instance for a while you can be in update hell because the containers might need newer versions and you need to read up on every service and how to update that. I much more appreciate the gitea approach. Simple setup, self contained but can be extended with external databases if needed
  - hinkley 4y ago
    I have a situation at work where someone keeps reporting CVEs to me and I don’t think they get that our docker base image gets automatically rebuilt every so many days and picks up all the fixed from Alpine. If we do nothing that window will close itself in a few days. So do you think we need to drop everything and work on this or just wait? Sounds like Mastodon is missing some engineering discipline and maybe this is a good time for some to show up. Fixing some of this stuff before Twitter gets even worse would be a good thing.
anotherrandom 4y ago
> ___ is inefficient but that's a good tradeoff Everyone who knows that a technology where decentralization is one of the requirements will know this, and they will also know that this is a required tradeoff when it comes to decentralization - no free lunch. A lot of people skewer blockchain-based tech for ineffeciency, but not a lot of those people realize it's supposed to be like that. I'm glad that people are at least starting to realize that a lot of decentralized tech has the prerequisite of forfeiting efficiency.
- berkes 4y ago
  And not just tech. In the article I tried to compare it to gardening. But my initial idea was to compare it two political issues recently in my country. That story was far too unrecognizable though. The issues are, where a decentralized police, that was governed by local mayors, was replaced by a central police force, governed by national government. Centralization that was sold as being much cheaper and more efficient. The cheaper was a lie, but only because the conversion itself turned out far more difficult. The more efficient is true. But only for a certain part of efficient. Previously, e.g. mayors could micro target issues that were directly plagueing a small neighborhood. Now, this is still possible, but has to move through layers of bureaucracy first. In many parts, i'm told, it's less efficient. Overall, the sum, however obviously operates more efficient. Instead of each of the thousands of municipalities having some HR, there now is only one. Same for IT, etc etc. The other issue is exactly reversed: mental service for Youth (youth care) a rather large institute, was decentralized: moved to municipalities. The promise was that this would allow far better detailed care. It is a fiasco, because the national government never considered that it would be far more expensive. They even promised it would cut costs. Why voters fall for this, and think that both promise can be true (decentralized being more expensive and saving money) is beyond me. But the effect of decentralization on effincy is clearly visible here too.

276 points by ericblues 4y ago

Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.

smaudet 4y ago
Makes me wonder if you can even build something like this, if decentralized systems must spend more time filtering junk, on a system which makes it easy to send it, it will always be too easy for malevolent actors to takedown. Unless you can incur a significant cost to these activities, e.g. requiring social capital (burning social capital with e.g. hate/disinformation), or physical (e.g. access requires boxes which cost some small fee and can be blacklisted)... Perhaps some of mastodon inefficient behavior can be leveraged here?
TulliusCicero 4y ago
People say that they're not terribly fond of rules until they see what that's actually like, then they decide that perhaps rules aren't so bad after all. It's easy to say that rules are 'censorship' in a vacuum, or when you're just talking with normal people, but when you get people intent on spamming or trolling or harassing, you quickly realize there's a reason human societies basically always end up with rules.
- arcade79 4y ago
  The problem is centralized rules. Different cultures has different rules. Joining it up to one platform and then enforcing one cultures rules on all the other culture is Not Okay. There are different views on nudity around the world. Nipples are normal where I'm from. There are different views and limitations on speech around the world. There are different views on copyright around the world. What's the term limit? There are different views on what constitutes animal abuse around the world. Try posting about the local bullfights on facebook. Or try posting videos from the cockfight from the cockfighting arena. Different mastodon servers, and heck, maybe different fediverses, will fuel diversity in this regard, without One Set of Rules to Rule them All.
  - TulliusCicero 4y ago
    On some level I agree. However, a huge part of what made Twitter appealing to people is precisely that it was essentially one giant instance, with sort of shared culture and rules. While I think Mastodon is fine for some people, it may not have the same 'global appeal', limiting its ability to really be a Twitter replacement.
rhn_mk1 4y ago
Mastodon has censorship tools built in. It's up to instance admins to use them.
jimbob45 4y ago
It’s not censorship. It’s the simplicity of the product. Social spaces succeed because they attract interesting people. In general, interesting people have the least amount of time to spend trying to maneuver through spam or wading through Nazi sympathizer/woke leftist posts. The barrier to entry has to be negligible to get the interesting people on board.
- nagonago 4y ago
  Depends on your definition of interesting people. If you mean celebrities and public figures, I agree that most will probably never join the Fediverse because of the high barrier to entry, although I think there's more to that problem than just a lack of centralized moderation. That said, in my opinion there are plenty of interesting people in the fediverse already. Personally I don't really care if the fediverse is widely adopted by celebrities and public figures or not.

ahMath8 4y ago

The real problem with Fediverse is we’ve already seen how people will use it ala Facebook and Twitter. I don’t get to goto work and engineer essentially the same product 2007 engineered. It’s a rehash of a rehash of an idea that will become another social landfill. Really looking forward to the technology equivalent of another Star Wars or Batman trilogy!

uneekname 4y ago

What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance. Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!

Kiro 4y ago
My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.
- sandyarmstrong 4y ago
  In my circles I'm seeing mass exodus. It's not just the tinkerers and the anarchists. I'm not surprised about the uptake in the open source community, after all I remember identi.ca being a lovely network for GNOME back in the day. But I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts. Sure, many of them are dual-posting. But I still see them interacting directly on Mastodon and not just mirroring their Twitter posts on it. I didn't expect this, but I'm finding it very easy not to use Twitter most of the time. The main exception is friends and family messaging various tweets to each other to share news or laugh about something. So I still have an account, it's still useful, but I'm not scrolling it casually anymore.
  - UncleOxidant 4y ago
    I setup a Mastodon account back in May as sort of "just in case Musk messes it up" insurance. And man, did he ever mess it up - worse & faster than my more pessimistic expectations. However, up until about 3 weeks ago there just weren't that many people to follow on mastodon. But that has changed more rapidly than I would have expected. Now I'm following several interesting people I used to follow on twitter.
  - 4y ago

phoe-krk 4y ago

> (...) the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, (...) This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic. There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Mastodon or its forks. The author mentions these other pieces of software later, but pulling them them as "some part of mastodon" is at best a misnomer. And it's been written about countless times already. See https://bofh.social/notice/APTBaDyBOOvNAzaeqO https://bofh.social/notice/APTBaDyBOOvNAzaeqO for a relatively fresh list.

xg15 4y ago
That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned. At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it. Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read, the software seems to be quite influential in shaping the "de-facto standard" client/server API, at least for the "microblogging" part of the Fediverse? Like, in theory, ActivityPub both specifies server/server and client/server interactions - however, the client/server part appears to be "underspecified and barely used" [1, 2]. e.g., AP doesn't say anything about how clients are authenticated or even how they can get notified of incoming messages/activities short of polling. This stuff is all specified in the Mastodon API. So in practice, if I wanted to write a new client app for microblogging on the fediverse, my app would use the Mastodon API, not ActivityPub for reference. Is that correct? Of course in the interest of avoiding centralisation, I'd agree that that's not a good state of affairs. It would be better if there was a real, widely-used standard for client/server and not just what the Mastodon devs think is useful. Though at least they cannot simply make changes to the API without convincing the majority of server admins to adopt those changes. [1] https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-client-to-server-faq/1941 https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/activitypub-client-to-... [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10520 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/10520

csande17 4y ago

Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one person either taking down a post or issuing a network-wide ban, just like on Twitter.

deleted 4y ago
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hnarn 4y ago
I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.
- csande17 4y ago
  I was responding to the "human inefficiencies" section of the article, which claims that Mastodon is inherently much more inefficient than Twitter because many different moderators (from different instances) must act on the same post. I don't think that's true in practice.
- seydor 4y ago
  > it gets added to a blacklist unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy
  - davisoneee 4y ago
    If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. You are not electing who goes on the list, but you are electing to follow certain lists implicitly by which instance you join. With mastodon/fediverse, you have a choice of numerous different 'twitters', rather than being stuck with the global twitter decision.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

This reminds me of acoup.blog and his take on subsistence farming as a risk reduction decision. Yes under Roman rule there was more "efficient" farming as some (slave worked) farms began focusing on primary crops for sale. This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere. But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they could have invented the co-op mass farm but the risks were too great - there was not a trade system globally that could guarantee delivery of food stuff X and so it was sensible to not focus your own production on food stuff Y but to grow a little of everything. I think what we are seeing here is Mastodon etc as the response to the risks of centralised but efficient servers - privacy, ads, government monitoring etc.

thrown_22 4y ago
That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown without easy boat access because they were worth more than their weight in gold.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  Well 20 miles from a navigable river looks a lot like most of populated Europe and China... But I absolutely take the point - anything that can fit in an online comment is a gross simplification- especially for "farming since invention of agriculture". Also the 20 mile is not a hard limit - it's easy to envisage some kind of system where I grow my cash crops near transport like river or coast, and sell them on a trade network, and you grow different crops further out and bring them not to the river / coast but to me to feed me. That probably will be more efficient but just look at the network of trust and possible disasters required - only very stable politics would allow anything like that - and that stability was rare. China probably had more of that for more of the past 2000 years than anywhere else - and that may be the cause of the invention of the bureaucrat!

peterweyand 4y ago

I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease of use a critical mass of users won't be possible so it won't ever be anything other than a niche product.

imagineerschool 4y ago
I have been using it for a while, and it's pretty good. Only people who want to use it are on it. The feeling of community is real.
wruza 4y ago
If not a false memory, I have read it for a short while and from what I’ve seen (please excuse my opinion) it is a in a pretty good way a specific community(-es) which is probably not ready for this massive exodus. People of global communities barely understand the concept of lurking and local culture. Even with the obstacles you mentioned there is a chance for Mastodon’s own Eternal September happening. Quoting someone sad Warum retweeten alle aus Twitter? Das ist, als ob man sich von einer toxischen Freundin trennt und dann nur noch von ihr erzählt I hope they can handle it well.
andreyk 4y ago
Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a simple hosting service (eg we used MastoHost which made it almost as easy as starting a Slack or Discord) which makes signing up super easy.
- luckylion 4y ago

molly0 4y ago

I like Mastodon because it reminds me of an earlier and more interesting web. The same people I follow on Twitter I follow on Mastodon and I feel they are being more honest on Mastodon. This might not be true.

guerrilla 4y ago
Yes, I'm getting that nostalgia kick and the interactions I was seeking. Getting any of that was an very uphill battle on Twitter.
dotnet00 4y ago
I agree, the fediverse seems to be one of the places the "old internet" moved to. But personally I haven't found the waves of Twitter users running from Musk to be part of that. For the most part they seem to be running into the fediverse and expecting the same culture that Twitter had. As these sorts of waves tend to always go, I expect it to either fizzle out or to ruin the culture that everyone prior to them got to enjoy. Although maybe the fediverse will be a bit more resilient to this due to being less centralized.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  Like most things it'll end up being a mix. Some of the people running to Mastodon/AP will leave. Some will stay. It's a net-win for fediverse. But as I've said elsewhere, will not replace Twitter. But the world also doesn't need a Twitter. That kind of single "town square" doesn't work. Can't work. And just attracts blowhards and narcissists. And the world will be better without it.

irusensei 4y ago

I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money. It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?

HollowEyes 4y ago
I am partially surprised that the reading portal is the same as the authoring one. It would feel better if we had one great feed reader, and an authoring pumping station. The blurred lines makes it more difficult to comprehend as much. Who moderates offshore content?
- irusensei 4y ago
  > Who moderates offshore content Whoever is in the pilot seat and that’s beautiful. Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps. Also server-wide block done by administrators. If I’m not mistaken the largest mastodon instance is Pawoo.net and that’s basically a japanese board for posting controversial hentai artwork. Pawoo.net is blacklisted from most popular Mastodon servers.
  - amadeuspagel 4y ago
    I'd be surprised to learn that it's blacklisted from any feed readers. That illustrates the usefulness of separating reader app and hosting.
    - irusensei 4y ago
      Pretty sure it happened to Gab nodes. In this case justified (and probably with a bit of push from Apple and Google) but the precedent exists. Slightly related Google blocked Element a few years ago because something posted on a federated instance. I think they strong handed matrix.org to implement moderation on the default servers.

ForHackernews 4y ago

I think this article underestimates the inefficiencies in large, centralized systems where efficiency is not a goal, and incentives are weighted against it. Famously, Facebook's iOS app is over 100 MB[0] and for Android, their engineers hacked the Dalvik VM because they had so many class definitions they were overflowing a 5MB buffer just for the definitions - and then, staggeringly, they bragged about this obscenity.[1] I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app. [0] https://www.cio.com/article/230043/why-is-facebooks-ios-app-so-bloated.html https://www.cio.com/article/230043/why-is-facebooks-ios-app-... [1] https://engineering.fb.com/2013/03/04/android/under-the-hood-dalvik-patch-for-facebook-for-android/ https://engineering.fb.com/2013/03/04/android/under-the-hood...

ilyt 4y ago
From what I've seen their datancenter stuff is way more competent >I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app. Uh, of course they are running their own datacenters, they are one of biggest sites on net, outsourcing infrastructure to cloud makes no goddamn sense to them
- csande17 4y ago
  From my limited experience in Big Tech, these kinds of companies are pretty good at running data centers from the hardware, networking, and low-level OS management perspectives. But their server-side programming/"backend engineering" suffers from a lot of the same problems as their mobile app development. In fact, it's frequently way worse because you can't say anything like "what if someone wants to download our app over a 3G data connection" to get people to cut down on bloat. Overstaffing and ship-the-org-chart syndrome leads to ginormous app bundles on the client and 7000 microservices on the server.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    It does look like many of the "hey, look at what cool things we do in our datacenter level infrastructure" stems from the stuff they run on that being overly complicated.

nyanpasu64 4y ago

I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where you expect anyone on any server to be able to reply to people on another server.

ilyt 4y ago
I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter. Yet of course that doesn't scale well to bigger social discussions, it's way too easy for malicious agents to destroy any chance for sensible wider discussion when there is no moderation present. HN/Reddit-esque "just let people downvote and push the downvoted stuff down" works somewhat in most cases, up until some group decides to vote brigade the conversation, and in wider discussion there is also the problem of "I downvote not because the comment is bad but because it disagrees with me.
- oaiey 4y ago
  And what is the difference to SMTP? That is literally the decentralized messaging platform which is alive for 40 (?) years and still kicking. There will be problems but there is evidence that it can work.
  - csande17 4y ago
    SMTP being created 40 years ago is probably why it still works today. Just like the telephone network, it has a historical exception from the moral obligation to prevent Bad People from using the network to say harmful or incorrect things. (Section 230 didn't exist back then, so it wasn't clear that that kind of moderation was even legal without taking full responsibility for everything users say.) Mastodon doesn't have this kind of exception, so it suffers from a lot of conflict about who exactly the Bad People are and whether accepting messages from them causes you to become a Bad Person yourself.

dbrgn 4y ago

"My honey would cost over €10 a jar if I'd pay my time." Locally made honey (i.e. not from South America) in Switzerland usually costs significantly more than 10€ :)

berkes 4y ago
Author here. I did not go into this, but it really is a problem that I, and most of my fellow hobby beekeepers undercharge. That we don't count our hours into the price means that the few Beekeepers who do it professionally, have a hard time charging proper prices. So I'm happy to hear Swiss prices are better. Though, having lived and worked there a summer, I guess it's still relatively cheap. The price of a coffee....

overlisted 4y ago

TLDR: Calling self-hosting inefficient is like calling homegrown food inefficient.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

I'm not sure I accept the premise. I can imagine it being both more efficient and just better in various measures as well. For starters just the ads and trackers must have a cost, which is paid on every visit. As we've seen many times on the internet, cacheable content can be far more efficient than constantly updated content that needs refetched just to show you an ad impression. Google's web page speed tools will warn you about Google Ads non-cachable JS tracker. Combine that with the incentive to show growth in 'user' metrics, which encourages both leniency on bots and intentionally addictive designs for non-bots and I can see an obvious case for twitter being less efficient.

supermatt 4y ago

Why does every instance need a copy of posted assets? Is that really the case?

gfaster 4y ago
I believe the problem is server load. You want each server to listen and send updates to the federated feed, and forward the federated feed to the users of that instance. What you want to avoid is a celebrity on instance A posting and then users all over the fediverse pinging instance A to get that post. Instead, instance A sends the post to the fediverse and then for any given user to view the post, they ping their own instance. That allows server requirements to be more closely tied with the number of accounts on it and how heavily they use it rather than the popularity of any given account. Additionally, it makes it so servers only have to interact with their own users and other federated servers. Of course the downside to this is that as the fediverse as a whole grows, the volume of the federated firehose increases, which still increases the minimum requirements (processing power, bandwidth, and storage alike). There may be middle grounds here. For example, the instance I'm on (I have no idea how common this is) stores text posts from other servers but images from are not saved, it's the originating server that serves those. Additionally, there may be the possibility of deleting old posts from the fediverse that don't have any local replies, or something like that. There are issues with the latter, especially with old friends-only posts becoming impossible to access by looking at the public profile on the original server, but I could see that being solved by something like generating a readonly token for the other server or something like that.

doener 4y ago

I think the author idealizes a bit strongly here. Internet infrastructure is not a garden, so I don't think the metaphor fits. And the exponentially growing requirements for hardware and power consumption are at least a real challenge - although certainly not as extreme as with proof-of-work blockchains.

cinntaile 4y ago
What does this have to do with blockchains?
- xigoi 4y ago
  That the energy consumption of Mastodon is negligible in comparison.
  - cinntaile 4y ago
    I took the car to the store, it's not great but it's not as wasteful as proof-of-work blockchains. What is the point of making irrelevant comparisons is what I'm asking.
berkes 4y ago
I really tried to convey your exact point. That gardening is inneffient. That I'm probably spending more CO2 because I have a rake. My neighbor buys a rake. The other neighbor buys one, etc. All with a footprint. That farmer producing millions of zucchinis probably has one rake. A tiny footprint, compared . But energy and Co2 make the article even more convoluted. Bitcoin (PoW) even more so. And there's a major difference. In which PoW deliberately burns energy. Whereas the fediverse at least tries to burn as little as possible while remaining decentralized.

azangru 4y ago

> And so is the case with the fediverse. The six million users would "easily" fit on a mastodon on under thirty (virtual) servers, a very few large PostgreSQL database servers and a single file-server/storage. I know, because I've built and grown such Rails systems, with millions of users (on AWS). Certainly not thousands of servers. Definitely not thousands of database-servers. > Even if Mastodon were to be rewritten in Rust, tuned, and changed into a backend that can host thousands of users on a single Raspberry-Pi running on solar power, it still is inefficient. For one, because that backend would be even more efficient when employed in a centralized setup. And secondly because there is a lot of network overhead. Reading these two paragraphs, I was struck by how similar it is to the argument against proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, only with the oppozite conclusions. Look how wasteful, they will say, look how inefficient, and slow, and non-green it is. It's rare to hear someone argue that yes, a technology is wasteful, and it is a good thing.

mlindner 4y ago

Won't this just end up in the situation that the far right stays on Parler and the far left goes to Mastodon? Sounds like Twitter will end up a happier place without the extremists.

haunter 4y ago
Pretty much. You can already see the ideological lines laid down on Mastodon

its-summertime 4y ago

thought experiment: Write a twitter clone for a moderately sized community, lets say 10k with probably, 1-5% of community active at any given time. hell, even throw in activitypub if you want. vs. Write twitter. I know which I'd rather do! Only one of the two is easier than rocket science! (haha) Its inefficient because it hasn't needed to be efficient, but that will change in the future or someone else'll take over. Cascade issues are fixable. the end result is proven achievable (see telcos and the SMS systems that cover the world, global scale federated messaging exists and works!)

deleted 4y ago
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VonGuard 4y ago

Standards can fix this stuff: https://spritely.institute/ https://spritely.institute/ Spritely is an effort to fix the problems that remain with ActivityPub.

CharlesW 4y ago
> Spritely is an effort to fix the problems that remain with ActivityPub. If that's true, then your single sentence does more to communicate what Spritely wants to do than that entire website. Even searching for occurrences of "ActivityPub" on the site with Google¹ returns mostly 404s. It sure does not appear to be a living concern. ¹ https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aspritely.institute+%22activityPub%22&oq=site%3Aspritely.institute+%22activityPub%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aspritely.institute+%2...

carapace 4y ago

Whenever you hear the words "efficient" or "inefficient" you should always have in the fore of your mind the question "For what goal?" or in other words "By what metric?" A lot can hide in the unspoken assumptions behind the unqualified use of the idea of efficiency. In this case the comparison of "efficiency" of Twitter vs. Mastodon is pretty meaningless. There are as many goals as there are users and moderators and (in Twitter's case) management and investors, eh? Of course, there are broad groupings and shared interests, but by and large the folks using Twitter and/or Mastodon have different goals. It reminds me of comparisons between industrial farming and small-scale ecological farming: industrial farming is more efficient at creating massive amounts of some kinds of products, but it literally cannot produce any of some other kinds of products. (E.g. you can't get Alpine strawberries in the supermarket because they start to lose structural integrity the very moment you pick them. The only way to get them is to grow them close to your kitchen.) - - - - As a bit of a tangent, I like to reflect how evolution has no goals therefore speaking of the efficiency of living systems is meaningless. Evolution is a chemical tautology.

kazinator 4y ago

Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search. When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results. For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago. If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get nothing. BUT: if I use the URL <domain>/tags/lisp, bam: recent stuff appears! On either instance. The same if I see the hash tag in a post and click on it. Users are going to join Mastodon and try to use the search box to find content related to their interests, and falsely conclude that there is nothing, or next to nothing. That is going to cause some nonzero user attrition. It's not just a problem for tags like #lisp, but mainstream things like #kids, #parenting, #dogs, what have you. My home instance comes up with nothing for any of these searches, with or without hash. Not quite; for "dogs" it finds a user named "Elon Musk F___s Dogs" as its only search result.

geek_at 4y ago
for me as a server admin I hate how incredibly annoying it is to set up a new instance. Even the docker setup is very poorly explained (as in not at all in the official documentation) and there are so many subsystems needed for the setup. There are many third party setup guides but most are so outdated that they don't work anymore It's not self contained and after running an instance for a while you can be in update hell because the containers might need newer versions and you need to read up on every service and how to update that. I much more appreciate the gitea approach. Simple setup, self contained but can be extended with external databases if needed
- hinkley 4y ago
  I have a situation at work where someone keeps reporting CVEs to me and I don’t think they get that our docker base image gets automatically rebuilt every so many days and picks up all the fixed from Alpine. If we do nothing that window will close itself in a few days. So do you think we need to drop everything and work on this or just wait? Sounds like Mastodon is missing some engineering discipline and maybe this is a good time for some to show up. Fixing some of this stuff before Twitter gets even worse would be a good thing.

anotherrandom 4y ago

> ___ is inefficient but that's a good tradeoff Everyone who knows that a technology where decentralization is one of the requirements will know this, and they will also know that this is a required tradeoff when it comes to decentralization - no free lunch. A lot of people skewer blockchain-based tech for ineffeciency, but not a lot of those people realize it's supposed to be like that. I'm glad that people are at least starting to realize that a lot of decentralized tech has the prerequisite of forfeiting efficiency.

berkes 4y ago
And not just tech. In the article I tried to compare it to gardening. But my initial idea was to compare it two political issues recently in my country. That story was far too unrecognizable though. The issues are, where a decentralized police, that was governed by local mayors, was replaced by a central police force, governed by national government. Centralization that was sold as being much cheaper and more efficient. The cheaper was a lie, but only because the conversion itself turned out far more difficult. The more efficient is true. But only for a certain part of efficient. Previously, e.g. mayors could micro target issues that were directly plagueing a small neighborhood. Now, this is still possible, but has to move through layers of bureaucracy first. In many parts, i'm told, it's less efficient. Overall, the sum, however obviously operates more efficient. Instead of each of the thousands of municipalities having some HR, there now is only one. Same for IT, etc etc. The other issue is exactly reversed: mental service for Youth (youth care) a rather large institute, was decentralized: moved to municipalities. The promise was that this would allow far better detailed care. It is a fiasco, because the national government never considered that it would be far more expensive. They even promised it would cut costs. Why voters fall for this, and think that both promise can be true (decentralized being more expensive and saving money) is beyond me. But the effect of decentralization on effincy is clearly visible here too.