4 ms·

(Mastodon) Surviving and thriving through the 2022-11-05 meltdown

46 points by bshanks 4y ago

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
That’s a great write-up. I suspect that a lot of folks are in the same boat. Mastodon will be getting a workout. The bugs will show up en masse, but they will also be fixed, and the service will improve greatly, as a result, with a lot of “lessons learned” lore, added to the canon. I noticed that CNN ran a front-page story on Mastodon, so it’s now mainstream. Welcome to the big leagues, li’l buddy…
- mdaniel 4y ago
  On a related thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33562163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33562163) there was some discussion about the fork-centric model of Mastodon codebases and instances, so "will also be fixed" is one of those nuanced things: they may be fixed in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon but how long will it take to fold those patches into the forks and update the hundreds(?) of instances out there advertising their version number on the homepage?
  - ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    That's the issue with these federated systems. I'm the original author of a [much more humble] independent, federated system, and understand this. It basically takes patience. Having an "upgrade carrot," to encourage folks to go through the upgrade (and making the upgrade seamless) is helpful.
Nican 4y ago
Huh- Running Postgres at home, while running the web server on Digital Ocean. I would think that since running several round trips to the database for every web request, it would make more sense to run the entire web server at home?
midislack 4y ago
I estimate only about a 5-8% total increase in Fediverse users since September.
- scambier 4y ago
  The number of Mastodon users went from 6.0M to 6.6M in the last week. https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount
  - midislack 4y ago
    Mastodon is only one tiny part of the Fediverse. Makes my estimate seem OK.
    - scambier 4y ago
      Mastodon is the biggest part of the Fediverse. https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/ According to this page, between September 1st and November 13th, the user count went from 6.12M to 7.56M, so an increase of 23%. Where does your estimation come from?
pimeys 4y ago
When I started my personal instance, one of my goals was to run it cheaply and with little maintenance. Being writing Ruby for many years of my past life, the decision between Mastodon (Rails) and Pleroma (Elixir) was quite easy. A week later, my Pleroma instance is taking 500 megabytes of RAM and a few percent of the CPU of the second cheapest Hetzner instance (4.5€/month). Even better would be a deployable binary service. Calling out all Go and Rust developers!
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  Written in Go. Not done yet. https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
  - pimeys 4y ago
    There are few ongoing Rust projects too, not ready yet though. In a year or two I might migrate. Pleroma works quite well though...
throwaway22032 4y ago
Why do people keep building large scale projects like this in languages in Ruby? I don't get it. It feels as if fundamentally you've built a prototype. We're talking about messages and images, this sort of thing should be able to run on a 500mhz Celeron as long as the bandwidth is there.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
  500Mhz? We don't need a super computer for this, we were playing 3D 6DOF games on 100Mhz pentiums with 16MB of RAM with mutliplayer over dialup. Our industry is a fucking joke.
  - throwaway22032 4y ago
    Yeah. It's honestly bizarre to me. I prototype in Python, and sure I might be lazy and use it for services that I know don't have to scale at all. But as soon as I point something towards the public internet it's just gotta be better than that.
eliben 4y ago
Twitter's biggest/hardest problem seems to be content moderation. With all the people moving to Mastodon now, it's not clear how Mastodon is going to handle this? Is the hope that just folks of a given political viewpoint will move to Mastodon and moderation will not be necessary?
- dzogchen 4y ago
  On a server level users can be reported by users and banned by admins. Mastodon is federated, and individual servers (or even individual users on servers) can choose not to federate with particular servers.
  - eliben 4y ago
    Thanks for the explanation. If a huge number of "laypeople" flocks to Mastodon, it's very likely that the users will be clustered around one or small number of "major" servers. So basically the admins of that server will become the de-facto moderators of discourse, it sounds like. Is that a reasonable course of events? Or will the idea be more like "lefties should go to $SERVER1, righties to $SERVER2" and then the two servers don't federate with each other because they find each other's content distasteful?
    - seba_dos1 4y ago
      It's both at the same time. The open and federated nature of the network allows for all those outcomes and more to happen simultaneously.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    I've seen complaints that cross-server moderation doesn't work well in practice. That is, a user deliberately joined a server with a moderation policy they liked. They see a lot of content that is supposed to be moderared out. They ask what's going on, and are told that content is being posted on other servers with admins with different policy views. This user is told they can either ban that specific user or ban the whole server. Neither is a good answer. I don't know (and don't care enough to research) if this is a flaw in the protocol or a specific implementation.

46 points by bshanks 4y ago

That’s a great write-up. I suspect that a lot of folks are in the same boat. Mastodon will be getting a workout. The bugs will show up en masse, but they will also be fixed, and the service will improve greatly, as a result, with a lot of “lessons learned” lore, added to the canon. I noticed that CNN ran a front-page story on Mastodon, so it’s now mainstream. Welcome to the big leagues, li’l buddy…

mdaniel 4y ago
On a related thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33562163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33562163) there was some discussion about the fork-centric model of Mastodon codebases and instances, so "will also be fixed" is one of those nuanced things: they may be fixed in https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon but how long will it take to fold those patches into the forks and update the hundreds(?) of instances out there advertising their version number on the homepage?
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  That's the issue with these federated systems. I'm the original author of a [much more humble] independent, federated system, and understand this. It basically takes patience. Having an "upgrade carrot," to encourage folks to go through the upgrade (and making the upgrade seamless) is helpful.

Nican 4y ago

Huh- Running Postgres at home, while running the web server on Digital Ocean. I would think that since running several round trips to the database for every web request, it would make more sense to run the entire web server at home?

midislack 4y ago

I estimate only about a 5-8% total increase in Fediverse users since September.

scambier 4y ago
The number of Mastodon users went from 6.0M to 6.6M in the last week. https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount https://bitcoinhackers.org/@mastodonusercount
- midislack 4y ago
  Mastodon is only one tiny part of the Fediverse. Makes my estimate seem OK.
  - scambier 4y ago
    Mastodon is the biggest part of the Fediverse. https://the-federation.info/ https://the-federation.info/ According to this page, between September 1st and November 13th, the user count went from 6.12M to 7.56M, so an increase of 23%. Where does your estimation come from?

pimeys 4y ago

When I started my personal instance, one of my goals was to run it cheaply and with little maintenance. Being writing Ruby for many years of my past life, the decision between Mastodon (Rails) and Pleroma (Elixir) was quite easy. A week later, my Pleroma instance is taking 500 megabytes of RAM and a few percent of the CPU of the second cheapest Hetzner instance (4.5€/month). Even better would be a deployable binary service. Calling out all Go and Rust developers!

OctopusLupid 4y ago
Written in Go. Not done yet. https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial https://github.com/superseriousbusiness/gotosocial
- pimeys 4y ago
  There are few ongoing Rust projects too, not ready yet though. In a year or two I might migrate. Pleroma works quite well though...

throwaway22032 4y ago

Why do people keep building large scale projects like this in languages in Ruby? I don't get it. It feels as if fundamentally you've built a prototype. We're talking about messages and images, this sort of thing should be able to run on a 500mhz Celeron as long as the bandwidth is there.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
500Mhz? We don't need a super computer for this, we were playing 3D 6DOF games on 100Mhz pentiums with 16MB of RAM with mutliplayer over dialup. Our industry is a fucking joke.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  Yeah. It's honestly bizarre to me. I prototype in Python, and sure I might be lazy and use it for services that I know don't have to scale at all. But as soon as I point something towards the public internet it's just gotta be better than that.

eliben 4y ago

Twitter's biggest/hardest problem seems to be content moderation. With all the people moving to Mastodon now, it's not clear how Mastodon is going to handle this? Is the hope that just folks of a given political viewpoint will move to Mastodon and moderation will not be necessary?

dzogchen 4y ago
On a server level users can be reported by users and banned by admins. Mastodon is federated, and individual servers (or even individual users on servers) can choose not to federate with particular servers.
- eliben 4y ago
  Thanks for the explanation. If a huge number of "laypeople" flocks to Mastodon, it's very likely that the users will be clustered around one or small number of "major" servers. So basically the admins of that server will become the de-facto moderators of discourse, it sounds like. Is that a reasonable course of events? Or will the idea be more like "lefties should go to $SERVER1, righties to $SERVER2" and then the two servers don't federate with each other because they find each other's content distasteful?
  - seba_dos1 4y ago
    It's both at the same time. The open and federated nature of the network allows for all those outcomes and more to happen simultaneously.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  I've seen complaints that cross-server moderation doesn't work well in practice. That is, a user deliberately joined a server with a moderation policy they liked. They see a lot of content that is supposed to be moderared out. They ask what's going on, and are told that content is being posted on other servers with admins with different policy views. This user is told they can either ban that specific user or ban the whole server. Neither is a good answer. I don't know (and don't care enough to research) if this is a flaw in the protocol or a specific implementation.