6 ms·

I agree with the author. Mastodon is quicksand. Instances are not guaranteed to keep existing, they depend entirely on a citizen running it, scaling it, and pa

by fleddr 4y ago

I agree with the author. Mastodon is quicksand. Instances are not guaranteed to keep existing, they depend entirely on a citizen running it, scaling it, and paying for all that, often with the help of donations. Even a relatively small influx of new users may pose an existential financial threat for the instance, or a lock so that nobody new can join. Even when things are running "normally", instance owners may simply quit. Further, did you know that almost every instance regularly purges all media attached to toots? Your instance, content within it, account you created within it, the media attached to your toots, are all incredibly fragile and can disappear at any time. The main Mastodon scaling approach: creating lots of small instances, makes this problem worse, not better. You're just spreading fragility. You don't have this insecurity at Twitter, not at this fundamental level. Twitter pretty much auto-scales and your content is not lost. Sure, people may get banned, but a normy user would normally not face these existential issues. The other thing that scales poorly is moderation. Twitter is sometimes perceived as being inconsistent in its rules (or biased), but this is a 100 times worse on Mastodon. Every instance has their own arbitrary and ever-changing rules. The same applies to federation. Instance mods regularly block federation with other instances based on arbitrary decisions. Technically, the UX is inconsistent. One instance may work well whilst the other has page loads into the 10 seconds, or federated content delayed by hours. Doesn't scale, fragile, and deeply inconsistent. It has a place and I still consider Mastodon an accomplishment. But it should not be compared with any of the centralized services.

tpxl 4y ago
> The other thing that scales poorly is moderation Moderation does scale poorly, which is why twitter is a shitshow and smaller forums (like this one) have a chance of being well moderated.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I get what you're saying, but you're missing some important aspects. I wasn't commenting on the quality of moderation, instead on the scalability. Instance owners are easily overwhelmed and this problem gets worse as things grow. Second, if your point is to create a tightly-moderated instance bubble, then Mastodon's federation features will largely go unused. If that is the outcome, then there's no point to Mastodon. You can recreate such spaces everywhere, for free.
SamBorick 4y ago
I think there's an axiomatic difference here. I don't believe any large service is more stable in the long term than a small one. To put it morbidly, all will be dust eventually. At least mastodon has account migration baked in. Additionally, why would I want all my content to last forever? If I want something to last forever I'll carve it on a rock, not toot it. Pretty much everything else you listed is a positive.
- fleddr 4y ago
  There's quite a lot of wiggle room between short term volatility and a concept like "forever". If you take it as far as "we'll all die anyway", you might as well not post anything, ever, anywhere. Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat.
  - kixiQu 4y ago
    > Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat. I'd be interested to see the halflife of centralized services generally to be able to tease out the patterns in a way less vulnerable to survivorship bias. I recognize that invoking Google's product shutdowns is like the free space on the HN comment bingo card, but... You could also point to the cases where Google shuts down someone's entire business or life on the internet for opaque reasons, without the user having any meaningful recourse, as a "constant threat" of a system that's scaled beyond the human. This conversation was just very, very different before the move feature. When mastodon.technology announced it needed to shut down (https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/ https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/), yes, the users learned they would lose their little chunk of namespace – old URLs would break, old content would need to be downloaded to archive – but the crucial thing is the social graph, and the move feature lets you pick up and move your followers. This is like if I could reach into the contacts files of everyone who had my email and update it. This means that "having [my] account and all content removed" is just a lot less big of a deal than when e.g. Facebook nukes someone's account.
MivLives 4y ago
I ran head into the first one. Back in August my instance owner announced they was going to be shutting down. Gave me plenty of time to move, and while followers and people you're following are easy to move, your content really isn't. Perhaps that's for the best? Perhaps social media in the microblogging style should be considered ephemera. Moderation and performance you're 100% dead on.
- fleddr 4y ago
  I'm putting myself in the shoes of a common Twitter user. To exaggerate a little, they are spoiled and have zero tolerance for friction. Look at all the complaints regarding onboarding. They are forced to pick a server and many directly stop at that, loudly complaining. Two days to wait for an activation email? Unacceptable. As for content preservation, I get what you're saying. At the same time, I do believe that people are not used to the idea that their old media is purposefully deleted, automatically. Or that their toots and instance account can disappear at will. Those are new concepts and frictions when coming from a central platform. To illustrate that point, Facebook has multiple giant data centers that host nothing but stale content. That pic you posted 7 years ago, it's over there. You will absolutely never ever look at it again, but in case you do...it's there. These massive investments underpin my idea that users expect their content to be persisted. If this wasn't important, Facebook would not do this. I think the complexity of content preservation is that social media has various uses. You can chit-chat and use it as a casual conversation tool, yet others use it as a broadcast channel. Some may use it for record-keeping. Creators may build up a portfolio of rich media posts. Some people may be fine with the chit-chat deleted, but for many other uses it would be not acceptable at all.
  - MivLives 4y ago
    This is a good point. Though I can't help but wondering if this is a take by an older person or least an older way of thinking about things. Stuff like snapchat, or the stories feature is closer to what a lot of people want. Most people I'm connected with on Instagram (friends and family only) don't post anything besides stories. There are very few who want to leave a trace on the web anymore. Especially now that digging up old tweets has become a sport.
bombcar 4y ago
Perhaps everything you ever said being stored forever on the Great Servers in the Cloud is not the best way to go about things. Loss and death are part of life, they should be part of online life, too. Especially for things that are basically a glorified chat room.
- fleddr 4y ago
  You're the second person to reply with this "forever" take. I never said forever, I'm talking about normal timelines where users on central networks expect their content to persist, which is what typically is the case. And for the record, Mastodon content is stored on the Great Servers in the Cloud. Most instances run on AWS VPS.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    My point is that in general "have to move everything because the instance I don't pay for is shutting down" should be more common, not less. Most people are surprised that old things they did on the internet can be found, and they're perhaps right.
    - fleddr 4y ago
      If you're suggesting that internet users are entitled, very much yes.
hrpnk 4y ago
In the '00s, phpBB forums and IRC were popular, but the Internet far less hostile for users. Even bigger challenges will come when instance operators are asked to comply with local law, requiring them to have privacy policies, t&cs and enforce these alongside regulations like GDPR.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Fully agree. Hobbyist moderators currently do moderation at-will. They may have a day job, go on a holiday, and of course they sleep. Without having several moderators across time zones, everything you said might become an existential issue, especially on larger and open instances. And to add insult to injury, better anti-harassment features are near impossible to implement because of the nature of federation. Other instances may run an older version, or simply chose to ignore your new rules. If and when Mastodon grows to the size as becoming interesting for many mass scale harassment attacks, the only logical way out is to disable the federation part more and more. Which means you basically end up with tiny centralized bubbles. For which you could have simply created a subreddit or Discord, for free.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Those tiny centralized bubbles would be run by whoever runs the instances hosting them. With Reddit or Discord subs/instances, you're still at the whim of the people who own them.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Or they become hosted in jurisdictions that won’t help the EU collect any GDPR fines they choose to levy.
yborg 4y ago
>Your instance, content within it, account you created within it, the media attached to your toots, are all incredibly fragile and can disappear at any time You realize of course that this is true of any platform? You do have this kind of insecurity with Twitter as we are seeing in real time. Musk has already stated that he wants to reduce Twitter's infrastructure costs, he could decide that all content older than N years is being discarded, even more easily than he discarded half of Twitter's workforce.
- fleddr 4y ago
  These insecurities are not at the same level, and do not compare. Don't see it as the difference between zero security and infinite security, it's a spectrum or scale instead. On FB, I can go back 10 years and my content is still there. All of it. With the exception of a suspension, FB doesn't delete user content. Ever. The same applies to Twitter. Their track record of content persistence is excellent. On Mastodon, media gets purged pretty much by policy. So you can be sure that you lose it all, thus rendering old toots useless. Add to this that every instance can disappear at any time, so besides your content, your account is also not safe. What Musk could and could not decide is speculation. Track record looks back, not forward.
  - xg15 4y ago
    > Their track record of content persistence is excellent. Musk has just replaced the entire leadership of Twitter. What kind of track record Twitter used to have is entirely irrelevant for how it will behave in the future. It's the same fallacy like a reputable company selling a well-known brand. People will stick to the brand (for a while) because they associate it with the performance of the original company behind it. However, that's a deception. The brand itself will tell you nothing about how the new company will behave.
    - fleddr 4y ago
      I really don't want to go down the Twitter rabbit hole. An exception to the rule (which is still speculative) does not disprove the rule. The rule being that on large centralized platforms, one has drastically better content security.
Ptchd 4y ago
> Instances are not guaranteed to keep existing, What is guaranteed to keep existing in this world? certainly not the Internet....
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Don't get hung up on the word "guarantee" and make this a question of absolutes. The question is whether you would bet on your content still being on twitter vs still being on Bob's server X years from now. And the answer is that you would definitely bet the farm on twitter, no matter what X is. That's an architectural problem with Mastodon, and can probably be fixed. But twitter has it solved by acting as a sort of well-established, large data bank; a place where you store your tweet data. Going to a Mastodon instance is like going to a tiny credit union, if credit unions weren't regulated in any way.

by fleddr 4y ago

tpxl 4y ago

> The other thing that scales poorly is moderation Moderation does scale poorly, which is why twitter is a shitshow and smaller forums (like this one) have a chance of being well moderated.

fleddr 4y ago
I get what you're saying, but you're missing some important aspects. I wasn't commenting on the quality of moderation, instead on the scalability. Instance owners are easily overwhelmed and this problem gets worse as things grow. Second, if your point is to create a tightly-moderated instance bubble, then Mastodon's federation features will largely go unused. If that is the outcome, then there's no point to Mastodon. You can recreate such spaces everywhere, for free.

SamBorick 4y ago

I think there's an axiomatic difference here. I don't believe any large service is more stable in the long term than a small one. To put it morbidly, all will be dust eventually. At least mastodon has account migration baked in. Additionally, why would I want all my content to last forever? If I want something to last forever I'll carve it on a rock, not toot it. Pretty much everything else you listed is a positive.

fleddr 4y ago
There's quite a lot of wiggle room between short term volatility and a concept like "forever". If you take it as far as "we'll all die anyway", you might as well not post anything, ever, anywhere. Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  > Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat. I'd be interested to see the halflife of centralized services generally to be able to tease out the patterns in a way less vulnerable to survivorship bias. I recognize that invoking Google's product shutdowns is like the free space on the HN comment bingo card, but... You could also point to the cases where Google shuts down someone's entire business or life on the internet for opaque reasons, without the user having any meaningful recourse, as a "constant threat" of a system that's scaled beyond the human. This conversation was just very, very different before the move feature. When mastodon.technology announced it needed to shut down (https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/ https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/), yes, the users learned they would lose their little chunk of namespace – old URLs would break, old content would need to be downloaded to archive – but the crucial thing is the social graph, and the move feature lets you pick up and move your followers. This is like if I could reach into the contacts files of everyone who had my email and update it. This means that "having [my] account and all content removed" is just a lot less big of a deal than when e.g. Facebook nukes someone's account.

MivLives 4y ago

I ran head into the first one. Back in August my instance owner announced they was going to be shutting down. Gave me plenty of time to move, and while followers and people you're following are easy to move, your content really isn't. Perhaps that's for the best? Perhaps social media in the microblogging style should be considered ephemera. Moderation and performance you're 100% dead on.

fleddr 4y ago
I'm putting myself in the shoes of a common Twitter user. To exaggerate a little, they are spoiled and have zero tolerance for friction. Look at all the complaints regarding onboarding. They are forced to pick a server and many directly stop at that, loudly complaining. Two days to wait for an activation email? Unacceptable. As for content preservation, I get what you're saying. At the same time, I do believe that people are not used to the idea that their old media is purposefully deleted, automatically. Or that their toots and instance account can disappear at will. Those are new concepts and frictions when coming from a central platform. To illustrate that point, Facebook has multiple giant data centers that host nothing but stale content. That pic you posted 7 years ago, it's over there. You will absolutely never ever look at it again, but in case you do...it's there. These massive investments underpin my idea that users expect their content to be persisted. If this wasn't important, Facebook would not do this. I think the complexity of content preservation is that social media has various uses. You can chit-chat and use it as a casual conversation tool, yet others use it as a broadcast channel. Some may use it for record-keeping. Creators may build up a portfolio of rich media posts. Some people may be fine with the chit-chat deleted, but for many other uses it would be not acceptable at all.
- MivLives 4y ago
  This is a good point. Though I can't help but wondering if this is a take by an older person or least an older way of thinking about things. Stuff like snapchat, or the stories feature is closer to what a lot of people want. Most people I'm connected with on Instagram (friends and family only) don't post anything besides stories. There are very few who want to leave a trace on the web anymore. Especially now that digging up old tweets has become a sport.

bombcar 4y ago

Perhaps everything you ever said being stored forever on the Great Servers in the Cloud is not the best way to go about things. Loss and death are part of life, they should be part of online life, too. Especially for things that are basically a glorified chat room.

fleddr 4y ago
You're the second person to reply with this "forever" take. I never said forever, I'm talking about normal timelines where users on central networks expect their content to persist, which is what typically is the case. And for the record, Mastodon content is stored on the Great Servers in the Cloud. Most instances run on AWS VPS.
- bombcar 4y ago
  My point is that in general "have to move everything because the instance I don't pay for is shutting down" should be more common, not less. Most people are surprised that old things they did on the internet can be found, and they're perhaps right.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    If you're suggesting that internet users are entitled, very much yes.

hrpnk 4y ago

In the '00s, phpBB forums and IRC were popular, but the Internet far less hostile for users. Even bigger challenges will come when instance operators are asked to comply with local law, requiring them to have privacy policies, t&cs and enforce these alongside regulations like GDPR.

fleddr 4y ago
Fully agree. Hobbyist moderators currently do moderation at-will. They may have a day job, go on a holiday, and of course they sleep. Without having several moderators across time zones, everything you said might become an existential issue, especially on larger and open instances. And to add insult to injury, better anti-harassment features are near impossible to implement because of the nature of federation. Other instances may run an older version, or simply chose to ignore your new rules. If and when Mastodon grows to the size as becoming interesting for many mass scale harassment attacks, the only logical way out is to disable the federation part more and more. Which means you basically end up with tiny centralized bubbles. For which you could have simply created a subreddit or Discord, for free.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Those tiny centralized bubbles would be run by whoever runs the instances hosting them. With Reddit or Discord subs/instances, you're still at the whim of the people who own them.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Or they become hosted in jurisdictions that won’t help the EU collect any GDPR fines they choose to levy.

yborg 4y ago

>Your instance, content within it, account you created within it, the media attached to your toots, are all incredibly fragile and can disappear at any time You realize of course that this is true of any platform? You do have this kind of insecurity with Twitter as we are seeing in real time. Musk has already stated that he wants to reduce Twitter's infrastructure costs, he could decide that all content older than N years is being discarded, even more easily than he discarded half of Twitter's workforce.

fleddr 4y ago
These insecurities are not at the same level, and do not compare. Don't see it as the difference between zero security and infinite security, it's a spectrum or scale instead. On FB, I can go back 10 years and my content is still there. All of it. With the exception of a suspension, FB doesn't delete user content. Ever. The same applies to Twitter. Their track record of content persistence is excellent. On Mastodon, media gets purged pretty much by policy. So you can be sure that you lose it all, thus rendering old toots useless. Add to this that every instance can disappear at any time, so besides your content, your account is also not safe. What Musk could and could not decide is speculation. Track record looks back, not forward.
- xg15 4y ago
  > Their track record of content persistence is excellent. Musk has just replaced the entire leadership of Twitter. What kind of track record Twitter used to have is entirely irrelevant for how it will behave in the future. It's the same fallacy like a reputable company selling a well-known brand. People will stick to the brand (for a while) because they associate it with the performance of the original company behind it. However, that's a deception. The brand itself will tell you nothing about how the new company will behave.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    I really don't want to go down the Twitter rabbit hole. An exception to the rule (which is still speculative) does not disprove the rule. The rule being that on large centralized platforms, one has drastically better content security.

Ptchd 4y ago

> Instances are not guaranteed to keep existing, What is guaranteed to keep existing in this world? certainly not the Internet....

pessimizer 4y ago
Don't get hung up on the word "guarantee" and make this a question of absolutes. The question is whether you would bet on your content still being on twitter vs still being on Bob's server X years from now. And the answer is that you would definitely bet the farm on twitter, no matter what X is. That's an architectural problem with Mastodon, and can probably be fixed. But twitter has it solved by acting as a sort of well-established, large data bank; a place where you store your tweet data. Going to a Mastodon instance is like going to a tiny credit union, if credit unions weren't regulated in any way.