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While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate t

While this is an entirely plausible (even likely) idea, I don't think it would play out that way. Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. In this scenario, Google will be defederated from the rest of the network, along with all their users. Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer. I think the core culture of the fediverse is sufficiently anti-corporation that it will be extremely difficult for someone like Google to corrupt it.

jefftk 4y ago
> some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing". I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...
- WorldMaker 4y ago
  A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". > I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. The big thing is instances can want their public timelines indexed but not their "followers only" timelines.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    > Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". That's rare, though, right? Since there's often a ton of following going around, especially now? It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks? > Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed.
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      > That's rare, though, right? Not in my experience. I'm on a tiny instance and follows are so rare in general, I can watch them all individually. There are many users that require follow requests where they verify/vet every single follow. > It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks? Maybe such that one person doesn't notice, but remember the scale here: if someone is trying to "follow the world" maliciously, they have to make sure that they pass the quick checks of every paranoid person they try to follow. Once a malicious site is "discovered" the #fediblock hash tag moves pretty virally to encourage other paranoid users/instances to (re-)evaluate the bad actor. > Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed (Courteous) Instances don't allow you to boost a Followers Only post to the Public timeline. Discourteous instances may exist, but when they are found out, they are generally blocked (again, the #fediblock hashtag sometimes moves swiftly and virally here).
      - fediblock 4y ago
        Fediblock just re-centralizes blacklisting to the (opaque) maintainers of that list, which defeats much of the point of federation
        WorldMaker 4y ago
        There's no "Fediblock central list". At the moment it's just a search hashtag that federates with other toots (it federates as toots because it is just toots). It is entirely up to instance admins what they do with what they see in that hashtag.
  - gs17 4y ago
    > A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". Well, there goes thinking I can always just host my own instance, I probably wouldn't be active enough for their tastes. And it adds another concern to joining a smaller instance, seems like I have to rely on other users to make it look more legit if I don't want to be so centralized. Or are they looking for very strictly, literally "lurker only" instances?
    - WorldMaker 4y ago
      There's always an "everyone blocks me and no one likes me" fear in hosting your own instance, and yes you will run the risk of preemptive blocks if people don't like how your instance looks. The particular combo here, though, is "lurker only instance" that also spams follow requests. If you don't spam follow requests and are selective about who you follow (like a human rather than a bot), you have less risk of this specific paranoia. Lurkers are fine to many Mastodon users. Lurkers spamming following requests are a concern.
    - xg15 4y ago
      Not a Mastodon user, but I'd imagine most admins follow common sense. If your server only has a handful of accounts that obviously correspond to you and your friends, I don't see why anyone would have a problem with that. On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion.
      - merlincorey 4y ago
        > On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion. Existing Twitter and Facebook connections (names, followers, friends, etc) to create many secret indexer servers made of easily verifiable Google searches of real people with real friends and GPT-like toot generation to fake just enough activity seems like a pretty straightforward route to avoid suspicion. Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
- Kye 4y ago
  You say that like you think it hasn't already happened. People noticed, admins compared notes, and they still ended up blocked.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    People catching some cases doesn't mean others aren't succeeding unnoticed. A privacy model that depends on "admins would probably notice something fishy" is not a model users should rely on.
    - Kye 4y ago
      All it takes is one person to notice for a #fediblock notice to propagate. The more instances, the harder it is to hide.
      - simfree 4y ago
        With OP's perspective services like Cloudflare, Akamai and anyone else trying to mitigate malicious traffic should just give up. This extremely nihilistic view is not productive, and ignores that 99% success in mitigating bad actors is much better than no mitigation.
- 2fast4you 4y ago
  ActivityPub makes it easy to crawl and index the whole Fediverse, you don't even need to start a server. I played with the idea a bit before I learned more about the community. If you're being intentionally malicious, disguising your traffic as legit shouldn't be impossible
- easrng 4y ago
  Authorized fetch makes it impossible to do this without either scraping the web interface (which some instances turn off (it's one switch in the settings)) or using a followbot which will get you #fediblocked immediately. RE: Search results, instances have a per-user option to add a noindex meta tag to your posts on the web interface.
- sinity 4y ago
  > The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing". Yeah, their culture doesn't sound very... sane from these descriptions. Neurotic about weird stuff, like someone linking to them.
  - peterashford 4y ago
    I would say that says more about your preconceptions than their sanity. There's nothing wrong with people wanting spaces with different rules. That's why they built their own space, after all
    - simfree 4y ago
      Built, currently host, manage access to, and block malicious actors from too. Some instances don't even allow non-logged in users to view public toots, good luck scraping those toots without sendingba follow request (which will be seen by the account and server admin.
thomastjeffery 4y ago
The core culture? Did you even read the headline? Eternal September And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices. Forget about core culture: that's gone now.
- krapp 4y ago
  > And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices No. Billions of people are not currently moving from Twitter to Mastodon.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Not currently, no. But if Google were to run an instance, there would be; which is the premise I was responding to.
    - krapp 4y ago
      Even in that case, I don't think it would happen. The only reason Mastodon is becoming "popular" is dissatisfaction with the way Elon Musk is running Twitter, and that's just a minority of the userbase. It's not like everyone went back to Usenet when Google started archiving it.
      - thomastjeffery 4y ago
        The only reason Mastadon isn't getting popular (without airquotes) is that it isn't popular enough. Social networks require a critical mass of popularity to attract most users.
    - rolenthedeep 4y ago
      I think it will be very hard if not impossible for any entity to have a widespread effect on the larger fediverse, simply because we can defederate problematic servers. The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of servers will block it on principle. Then every time they do something new and scummy, more servers will block them. Eventually, enough of the network will have defederated from them that they just don't have any reach outside of their own server. Not to mention that based on google's history, a mastodon server would last for maybe a year before Google gets bored and kills it. Sure, google could set up a server with a billion people, but how can that have an effect when nobody outside of that server sees any of it? If you wanted to force change on the fediverse, it'd probably have to be a massive undercover grassroots campaign. I'm talking spinning up hundreds of instances with a few thousand users each, and don't let anyone know that those instances are owned by Google. Then you play the long game where your users slowly influence other instances. I just don't see that happening. Every server in the fediverse is independent, and has its own culture. Thinking Google could cause change to all of those individual cultures is like saying if you put a few billion people in a new country it would change the global culture. Technically, yes, that could work on paper, but it doesn't really work in practice. Not on the sort of timescale any corporation is willing to invest in.
Ygg2 4y ago
> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. Replace Fediverse with email. And it would still stand. Then realize where email is today. Two-three email providers and hosting your own email server grows less and less plausible each day.
- jabits 4y ago
  This of course is nonsense. It takes some effort to host your own, but you can do it, and there are hundreds of email providers out there. And there is the middle ground of getting your own domain and “hosting” your own for $6/month with Microsoft 365 for example…
  - macintux 4y ago
    From the discussions here on HN the challenge doesn’t seem to be hosting your own so much as getting other mail providers to allow your email. Receiving is easy. Sending is much harder than it used to be.
  - joseda-hg 4y ago
    I recall reading here a guy complaining that self hosted emails we're super prone to blocking because they didn't come from a reputable Domain/address, and weren't whitelisted from some of the big guys Which is kind of the problem, if you need to be approved by the Big guys, there's not much of a point of calling open and fair You still can host for sure, but the moment M$/Gmail, blocks you, you've lost contact with half the people
    - simfree 4y ago
      IP and ASN reputation really matters, as does having SPF, DMARC, DKIM and Email Feedback Loop (FBL) properly configured. That being said, there are production mail servers on OVH (bad reputation mail wise) that deliver plenty of mail to Microsoft, Google and Apple mail servers every day.
- rolenthedeep 4y ago
sigstoat 4y ago
> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. sure, but it's being loaded up with piles of users who were perfectly happy with corporate bullshit two weeks ago. you're not going to make cultural converts of them before some bright eyed product manager at google spots this opportunity. in fact, you'll probably _never_ convert them. they'll probably convert the rest of the place. hence "eternal september".
- yoz-y 4y ago
  The comparison is apt, but you can ignore the federated timeline if your instance is what you came for. From what I understand though, the on-instance caching could be problematic if there is a sudden massive increase in user numbers (and people from your instance start following them)
- simfree 4y ago
  Instance admins ultimately control whether registrations are open, and can disable accounts of those users that aren't participating in the instance in a healthy manner. Additionally, expecting Google to have the fortitude of the fediverse when it comes to social media is hilarious We're coming up on year 6 of the ActivityPub standard, and there are plenty of half decade long fediverse participants like myself. If this were Google I would have been through at least one if not two major platform changes (where you generally lose features & your social graph) or a platform shutdown by now.
tensor 4y ago
And this in a nutshell is why Mastodon will always be niche and will never be a twitter replacement. Indexing every post is good and would be a solution to one of the biggest problems with Mastodon: discovering people to follow. As it currently stands Mastodon is a very toxic community of people in the sense that they don't care at all about what the average person actually wants or needs in a network like this. Any and all complaints or comments pointing out the problems with usability are met with exactly the sort of hostility you describe here. Hell, even as a very technical person I can't find anyone to follow on Mastodon other than developers. There was some large index of the most popular mastodon servers so I tried that and the top entry in the health category was an antivaxer spreading misinformation. Honestly what we need is a twitter replacement, centralized, with search and recommendations. Perhaps run by a non-profit council or something.
- not2b 4y ago
  I think Mastodon or a subset of it can evolve into what you want. We'll start seeing specialized servers that vet their members. As Elon drives people away, you'll see more technical people, more serious medical people and the like.
  - Shared404 4y ago
    Is your username a reference to the Minecraft server? /offtopic This is already happening somewhat. There's at least one server I can think of off the top of my head which is invite only, and purpose focused. Hoping to get an account there eventually, though I won't say the name and drive unneeded attention to it.
    - not2b 4y ago
      It's my geocaching name, and it's because my wife's geocaching name was often abbreviated to "2b".
- peterashford 4y ago
  Did it occur to you that maybe Mastodon wasn't created to cater for the average person?
Cyberdog 4y ago
> Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer. Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it. Just like with other services, you should expect that anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever, tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home server complied. That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.
- joepie91_ 4y ago
  And this is precisely the sort of thing that sets apart community-run projects like the fediverse (!= Mastodon) apart from for-profit platforms like Twitter. The fediverse culture is based around consent and guarding each other's safety. That means that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that people will accept you doing so. And that is precisely what happened here. Someone started indexing all the posts of a group of largely vulnerable and marginalized folks, without asking for their consent, without trying to understand the community norms, just barging in and doing what they felt like without concern for the consequences to other people's safety. They got swiftly ejected from the community accordingly. If you truly believe that it's okay to index things just because "well, I can technically access it" without any further consideration, then to put it bluntly: you are a threat to the safety of marginalized folks, and you are not welcome in those spaces. You should also consider that there are plenty of people who cannot afford to take such a cavalier attitude as you. > That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings. This is certainly true. The fediverse is not a replacement for Twitter, and it is not meant to be. The toxic Twitter culture is not wanted there. That of course doesn't stop media outlets from completely ignoring that and going for the quickest headline.
aidenn0 4y ago
The danger isn't fediverse defederating with Google, it's Google defederating with the fediverse. Look at what happened to jabber/gtalk...
- zen21 4y ago
  Why would Google defederating be worse than how things are now? Gmail users are not currently on mastodon anyway and things are fine.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    And RSS was fine before Google Reader came around.
    - zen21 4y ago
      And was fine afterwards.
      - e61133e3 4y ago
        it is still fine
        KerrAvon 4y ago
        Google Reader is actually a good example. RSS didn’t die, but the Google Reader death pushed a lot of people into Twitter for reading news.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    Let's assume for a moment that mastodon is growing still. If Google adds it to everybody with a Gmail account, then hardly anybody will sign up for a non-Google server. It's easy to imagine a world in which most people are accessing via Google's servers.
pasquinelli 4y ago
> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. will it continue to be?
rodgerd 4y ago
> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. You might have said the same thing about HTML, once. Now it's whatever the owner of the browser monopoly says that it is.
YetAnotherNick 4y ago
> for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit That will entirely work in favour of big companies. If there was a split and only one split is capable of serving 100 million users that split will win.
- Vinnl 4y ago
  It might win in the sense that that would then also be a thing that exists, but would not necessarily mean that Mastodon can no longer be what it is now, I don't think?
  - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
    Google talk had XMPP which is very similar to Fediverse, but then XMPP (mostly)died and Google talk survived
    - Zash 4y ago
      I remember it the other way around, Google killed Talk and repeatedly replaced it with non-XMPP things while XMPP survived to this very day!
      - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
        By Google talk I meant all its successor like hangouts and google chat. It's more like they moved its users to new service rather than killing it. Same with facebook messenger, which supported XMPP. Sure yeah XMPP is surviving but it's nowhere close to Google chat or FB messenger.
        zaik 4y ago
        It's kind of having a renaissance as more people discover the world outside of walled gardens. Platforms die eventually, internet standards are here to stay.
    - Vinnl 4y ago

jefftk 4y ago

> some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing". I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%22 https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+I+write+chord+charts%...

WorldMaker 4y ago
A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". > I also see Mastodon posts showing up in search results, so it looks to me like indexing is already happening Mastodon has a configurable robots.txt. Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. The big thing is instances can want their public timelines indexed but not their "followers only" timelines.
- jefftk 4y ago
  > Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". That's rare, though, right? Since there's often a ton of following going around, especially now? It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks? > Some instances are fine with search indexing their public timelines. Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed.
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    > That's rare, though, right? Not in my experience. I'm on a tiny instance and follows are so rare in general, I can watch them all individually. There are many users that require follow requests where they verify/vet every single follow. > It's probably also not that hard to make something that easily passes those sorts of quick checks? Maybe such that one person doesn't notice, but remember the scale here: if someone is trying to "follow the world" maliciously, they have to make sure that they pass the quick checks of every paranoid person they try to follow. Once a malicious site is "discovered" the #fediblock hash tag moves pretty virally to encourage other paranoid users/instances to (re-)evaluate the bad actor. > Which then means anything of yours that gets boosted by someone on a server like that will be indexed (Courteous) Instances don't allow you to boost a Followers Only post to the Public timeline. Discourteous instances may exist, but when they are found out, they are generally blocked (again, the #fediblock hashtag sometimes moves swiftly and virally here).
    - fediblock 4y ago
      Fediblock just re-centralizes blacklisting to the (opaque) maintainers of that list, which defeats much of the point of federation
      - WorldMaker 4y ago
        There's no "Fediblock central list". At the moment it's just a search hashtag that federates with other toots (it federates as toots because it is just toots). It is entirely up to instance admins what they do with what they see in that hashtag.
- gs17 4y ago
  > A lot of lurker-only servers tend to get blocked, too. Some instances check every follow/follow request and block if anything looks off, including "lurker only". Well, there goes thinking I can always just host my own instance, I probably wouldn't be active enough for their tastes. And it adds another concern to joining a smaller instance, seems like I have to rely on other users to make it look more legit if I don't want to be so centralized. Or are they looking for very strictly, literally "lurker only" instances?
  - WorldMaker 4y ago
    There's always an "everyone blocks me and no one likes me" fear in hosting your own instance, and yes you will run the risk of preemptive blocks if people don't like how your instance looks. The particular combo here, though, is "lurker only instance" that also spams follow requests. If you don't spam follow requests and are selective about who you follow (like a human rather than a bot), you have less risk of this specific paranoia. Lurkers are fine to many Mastodon users. Lurkers spamming following requests are a concern.
  - xg15 4y ago
    Not a Mastodon user, but I'd imagine most admins follow common sense. If your server only has a handful of accounts that obviously correspond to you and your friends, I don't see why anyone would have a problem with that. On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion.
    - merlincorey 4y ago
      > On the other hand, if the server has 100s of accounts, each of which follows a large number of people off-server - yet somehow no one follows anyone else on the server and no one ever talks a single word, that would probably raise some suspicion. Existing Twitter and Facebook connections (names, followers, friends, etc) to create many secret indexer servers made of easily verifiable Google searches of real people with real friends and GPT-like toot generation to fake just enough activity seems like a pretty straightforward route to avoid suspicion. Arms races suck -- public data is public, period.
Kye 4y ago
You say that like you think it hasn't already happened. People noticed, admins compared notes, and they still ended up blocked.
- jefftk 4y ago
  People catching some cases doesn't mean others aren't succeeding unnoticed. A privacy model that depends on "admins would probably notice something fishy" is not a model users should rely on.
  - Kye 4y ago
    All it takes is one person to notice for a #fediblock notice to propagate. The more instances, the harder it is to hide.
    - simfree 4y ago
      With OP's perspective services like Cloudflare, Akamai and anyone else trying to mitigate malicious traffic should just give up. This extremely nihilistic view is not productive, and ignores that 99% success in mitigating bad actors is much better than no mitigation.
2fast4you 4y ago
ActivityPub makes it easy to crawl and index the whole Fediverse, you don't even need to start a server. I played with the idea a bit before I learned more about the community. If you're being intentionally malicious, disguising your traffic as legit shouldn't be impossible
easrng 4y ago
Authorized fetch makes it impossible to do this without either scraping the web interface (which some instances turn off (it's one switch in the settings)) or using a followbot which will get you #fediblocked immediately. RE: Search results, instances have a per-user option to add a noindex meta tag to your posts on the web interface.
sinity 4y ago
> The next person will do this without announcing it, in a way that just looks like a server full of lurkers. When you have a protocol that's all about broadcasting things to anyone who asks to be notified, it's very hard to enforce "no indexing". Yeah, their culture doesn't sound very... sane from these descriptions. Neurotic about weird stuff, like someone linking to them.
- peterashford 4y ago
  I would say that says more about your preconceptions than their sanity. There's nothing wrong with people wanting spaces with different rules. That's why they built their own space, after all
  - simfree 4y ago
    Built, currently host, manage access to, and block malicious actors from too. Some instances don't even allow non-logged in users to view public toots, good luck scraping those toots without sendingba follow request (which will be seen by the account and server admin.

thomastjeffery 4y ago

The core culture? Did you even read the headline? Eternal September And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices. Forget about core culture: that's gone now.

krapp 4y ago
> And this time, we're talking about billions of new voices No. Billions of people are not currently moving from Twitter to Mastodon.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Not currently, no. But if Google were to run an instance, there would be; which is the premise I was responding to.
  - krapp 4y ago
    Even in that case, I don't think it would happen. The only reason Mastodon is becoming "popular" is dissatisfaction with the way Elon Musk is running Twitter, and that's just a minority of the userbase. It's not like everyone went back to Usenet when Google started archiving it.
    - thomastjeffery 4y ago
      The only reason Mastadon isn't getting popular (without airquotes) is that it isn't popular enough. Social networks require a critical mass of popularity to attract most users.
  - rolenthedeep 4y ago
    I think it will be very hard if not impossible for any entity to have a widespread effect on the larger fediverse, simply because we can defederate problematic servers. The moment a Google instance comes online, a lot of servers will block it on principle. Then every time they do something new and scummy, more servers will block them. Eventually, enough of the network will have defederated from them that they just don't have any reach outside of their own server. Not to mention that based on google's history, a mastodon server would last for maybe a year before Google gets bored and kills it. Sure, google could set up a server with a billion people, but how can that have an effect when nobody outside of that server sees any of it? If you wanted to force change on the fediverse, it'd probably have to be a massive undercover grassroots campaign. I'm talking spinning up hundreds of instances with a few thousand users each, and don't let anyone know that those instances are owned by Google. Then you play the long game where your users slowly influence other instances. I just don't see that happening. Every server in the fediverse is independent, and has its own culture. Thinking Google could cause change to all of those individual cultures is like saying if you put a few billion people in a new country it would change the global culture. Technically, yes, that could work on paper, but it doesn't really work in practice. Not on the sort of timescale any corporation is willing to invest in.

Ygg2 4y ago

> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. Replace Fediverse with email. And it would still stand. Then realize where email is today. Two-three email providers and hosting your own email server grows less and less plausible each day.

jabits 4y ago
This of course is nonsense. It takes some effort to host your own, but you can do it, and there are hundreds of email providers out there. And there is the middle ground of getting your own domain and “hosting” your own for $6/month with Microsoft 365 for example…
- macintux 4y ago
  From the discussions here on HN the challenge doesn’t seem to be hosting your own so much as getting other mail providers to allow your email. Receiving is easy. Sending is much harder than it used to be.
- joseda-hg 4y ago
  I recall reading here a guy complaining that self hosted emails we're super prone to blocking because they didn't come from a reputable Domain/address, and weren't whitelisted from some of the big guys Which is kind of the problem, if you need to be approved by the Big guys, there's not much of a point of calling open and fair You still can host for sure, but the moment M$/Gmail, blocks you, you've lost contact with half the people
  - simfree 4y ago
    IP and ASN reputation really matters, as does having SPF, DMARC, DKIM and Email Feedback Loop (FBL) properly configured. That being said, there are production mail servers on OVH (bad reputation mail wise) that deliver plenty of mail to Microsoft, Google and Apple mail servers every day.
rolenthedeep 4y ago

sigstoat 4y ago

> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. sure, but it's being loaded up with piles of users who were perfectly happy with corporate bullshit two weeks ago. you're not going to make cultural converts of them before some bright eyed product manager at google spots this opportunity. in fact, you'll probably _never_ convert them. they'll probably convert the rest of the place. hence "eternal september".

yoz-y 4y ago
The comparison is apt, but you can ignore the federated timeline if your instance is what you came for. From what I understand though, the on-instance caching could be problematic if there is a sudden massive increase in user numbers (and people from your instance start following them)
simfree 4y ago
Instance admins ultimately control whether registrations are open, and can disable accounts of those users that aren't participating in the instance in a healthy manner. Additionally, expecting Google to have the fortitude of the fediverse when it comes to social media is hilarious We're coming up on year 6 of the ActivityPub standard, and there are plenty of half decade long fediverse participants like myself. If this were Google I would have been through at least one if not two major platform changes (where you generally lose features & your social graph) or a platform shutdown by now.

tensor 4y ago

And this in a nutshell is why Mastodon will always be niche and will never be a twitter replacement. Indexing every post is good and would be a solution to one of the biggest problems with Mastodon: discovering people to follow. As it currently stands Mastodon is a very toxic community of people in the sense that they don't care at all about what the average person actually wants or needs in a network like this. Any and all complaints or comments pointing out the problems with usability are met with exactly the sort of hostility you describe here. Hell, even as a very technical person I can't find anyone to follow on Mastodon other than developers. There was some large index of the most popular mastodon servers so I tried that and the top entry in the health category was an antivaxer spreading misinformation. Honestly what we need is a twitter replacement, centralized, with search and recommendations. Perhaps run by a non-profit council or something.

not2b 4y ago
I think Mastodon or a subset of it can evolve into what you want. We'll start seeing specialized servers that vet their members. As Elon drives people away, you'll see more technical people, more serious medical people and the like.
- Shared404 4y ago
  Is your username a reference to the Minecraft server? /offtopic This is already happening somewhat. There's at least one server I can think of off the top of my head which is invite only, and purpose focused. Hoping to get an account there eventually, though I won't say the name and drive unneeded attention to it.
  - not2b 4y ago
    It's my geocaching name, and it's because my wife's geocaching name was often abbreviated to "2b".
peterashford 4y ago
Did it occur to you that maybe Mastodon wasn't created to cater for the average person?

Cyberdog 4y ago

> Just this week, some random person decided to start indexing every post on the mastodon network. The backlash to this was incredible. A lot of servers blocked this instance, and the guy got banned within hours of announcing his indexer. Kinda puzzled by this. Who's out there posting to the open Fediverse with no expectation that their posts are going to be seen, indexed, and possibly archived? It's like publishing a web page and expecting that search engines won't index it. Just like with other services, you should expect that anything you post to the Fediverse will be there forever, tucked away in databases, indexed by search engines, and outlive you. Even more so, since editing or deleting Fediverse posts is more like a polite request than an actual command; some servers ignore such requests even if your home server complied. That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings.

joepie91_ 4y ago
And this is precisely the sort of thing that sets apart community-run projects like the fediverse (!= Mastodon) apart from for-profit platforms like Twitter. The fediverse culture is based around consent and guarding each other's safety. That means that just because you can do something, that doesn't mean that people will accept you doing so. And that is precisely what happened here. Someone started indexing all the posts of a group of largely vulnerable and marginalized folks, without asking for their consent, without trying to understand the community norms, just barging in and doing what they felt like without concern for the consequences to other people's safety. They got swiftly ejected from the community accordingly. If you truly believe that it's okay to index things just because "well, I can technically access it" without any further consideration, then to put it bluntly: you are a threat to the safety of marginalized folks, and you are not welcome in those spaces. You should also consider that there are plenty of people who cannot afford to take such a cavalier attitude as you. > That people are getting upset at this idea gives further credence to the idea that these newcomers really have no idea what they're joining up to and are just hoping that "Mastodon" matches the ideal Twitter replacement they have in their heads with little to no understanding of the reality of its workings. This is certainly true. The fediverse is not a replacement for Twitter, and it is not meant to be. The toxic Twitter culture is not wanted there. That of course doesn't stop media outlets from completely ignoring that and going for the quickest headline.

aidenn0 4y ago

The danger isn't fediverse defederating with Google, it's Google defederating with the fediverse. Look at what happened to jabber/gtalk...

zen21 4y ago
Why would Google defederating be worse than how things are now? Gmail users are not currently on mastodon anyway and things are fine.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  And RSS was fine before Google Reader came around.
  - zen21 4y ago
    And was fine afterwards.
    - e61133e3 4y ago
      it is still fine
      - KerrAvon 4y ago
        Google Reader is actually a good example. RSS didn’t die, but the Google Reader death pushed a lot of people into Twitter for reading news.
- aidenn0 4y ago
  Let's assume for a moment that mastodon is growing still. If Google adds it to everybody with a Gmail account, then hardly anybody will sign up for a non-Google server. It's easy to imagine a world in which most people are accessing via Google's servers.

pasquinelli 4y ago

> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. will it continue to be?

rodgerd 4y ago

> Fediverse is literally built of, by, and for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit. You might have said the same thing about HTML, once. Now it's whatever the owner of the browser monopoly says that it is.

YetAnotherNick 4y ago

> for people who hate this kind of corporate bullshit That will entirely work in favour of big companies. If there was a split and only one split is capable of serving 100 million users that split will win.

Vinnl 4y ago
It might win in the sense that that would then also be a thing that exists, but would not necessarily mean that Mastodon can no longer be what it is now, I don't think?
- YetAnotherNick 4y ago
  Google talk had XMPP which is very similar to Fediverse, but then XMPP (mostly)died and Google talk survived
  - Zash 4y ago
    I remember it the other way around, Google killed Talk and repeatedly replaced it with non-XMPP things while XMPP survived to this very day!
    - YetAnotherNick 4y ago
      By Google talk I meant all its successor like hangouts and google chat. It's more like they moved its users to new service rather than killing it. Same with facebook messenger, which supported XMPP. Sure yeah XMPP is surviving but it's nowhere close to Google chat or FB messenger.
      - zaik 4y ago
        It's kind of having a renaissance as more people discover the world outside of walled gardens. Platforms die eventually, internet standards are here to stay.
  - Vinnl 4y ago