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Ned's spot on. The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join, whether I sho

by dossy 4y ago

Ned's spot on. The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join, whether I should start my own server, or if I join someone else's server, how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or even not possible at all?

zimpenfish 4y ago
> which server I "should" join Any you want as long as you're happy with their rules. > whether I should start my own server It's currently faff (but potentially getting better.) > how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts). Can take a while for everything to filter through on busy servers though.
- dossy 4y ago
  > You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts). That's what I thought based on what I've read so far, thanks for confirming. Unless and until that's fixed, if I finally see enough value in joining Mastodon, I will have to do so using my own server where I have full access to all my content.
  - vidarh 4y ago
    You can export all your content, including posts, but Mastodon doesn't support directly importing posts, so you need either a (very) friendly admin or your own server if you want to import it somewhere new.
    - pbronez 4y ago
      Yeah this is probably a needed feature. There are some good philosophical objections to post imports, but they’re overwhelmed by practical arguments for it. it’s a solvable problem.
      - vidarh 4y ago
        Absolutely agree. I think solutions will come, but they may well come as an extension or fork first until it's pointless for the core developers to resist. It's particularly idiotic because the Activities in the export are all signed, so an importing server just need to do a webfinger and profile lookup, and can then validate all of the posts. Of course you can still fake them, but if you show a "moved from <origin instance>" on them, that's really all you need to do - moves from, say, mastodon.social would be trustworthy, moves from some small instance would not. But even that can be fixed with tamper proof timestamps and signing the whole archive, and in any case you can validate this against the public API because it remains accessible on the origin server (at least for some time after the initial move, I don't know how long).
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  That last point is a doozy. Mastodon servers can be as bad as subreddits with power tripping mods, and you don’t necessarily know that until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, just like on reddit. And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts. Going from one server (Twitter) to multiple smaller servers doesn’t seem to go far enough on the axis to address major issues that Twitter has. e.g. you still don’t “own” your content.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > e.g. you still don’t “own” your content. If you're not running your own server, true.
  - dossy 4y ago
    > [...] until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, [...] And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts. Exactly. This is the critical flaw in Mastodon's design. It does not solve the single biggest flaw in Twitter (or any other typical platform) design, where the platform operator owns the network, and not the author/user. This is why I won't bother investing my own personal time and effort in joining anyone else's server, given how the current design is implemented. It's sad that BitTorrent has now existed for 21 years, and still no one has built a social media content distribution network on top of it. I would have done it but I don't have the motivation to do it alone, as it would tilt control away from the platform operators who require that control in order to monetize the platform to make it worth the investment. :sigh:
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts. Well, you pretty much can't migrate your posts anyway even if you're moving without being nuked. But if you get nuked, you probably can't move your followers either which would suck.
    - toofy 4y ago
      does twitter have this problem solved?
CharlesW 4y ago
> Ned's spot on. Definitely. This is a great post that helps explain to technical folks why Mastodon is not (and will never be) a replacement for Twitter, which I say as a Mastodon user and fan. If something has a chance to displace Twitter, it'll need to be as dead-simple to use (like Hive¹). > The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join… If you're looking for an opinionated answer to this question by someone who's just gone through this, for HN readers I can also recommend the instance mentioned in the article: hachyderm.io. There are a lot of tech and otherwise-interesting people there, and it's run by Kris Nóva². Her most recent articles on Medium talk about running an instance as a serious endeavor. > …if I join someone else's server, how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or even not possible at all? Kris's most recent post, "Experimenting with Federation and Migrating Accounts"³, goes into detail on how this works in practice. ¹ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/twitter-alternative-hive-jumps-to-top-20-on-the-u-s-app-store-after-surge-of-sign-ups/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/twitter-alternative-hive-j... ² SME in Linux kernel security, distributed systems and infrastructure management, and open-source software engineering. https://medium.com/@kris-nova https://medium.com/@kris-nova ³ https://medium.com/@kris-nova/experimenting-with-federation-and-migrating-accounts-eae61a688c3c https://medium.com/@kris-nova/experimenting-with-federation-...
- dossy 4y ago
  Thanks, @CharlesW. I'm familiar with Kris and follow her on Twitter, and see a lot of people have opted to join her Mastodon server, which is great, but her explanation of what happened when she tried to migrate her account from one server to another, where she even controlled both, points to the weakness in the fundamental Mastodon design that makes it a non-starter for me. Being able to export all of your data (posts, followers, following, blocks/mutes, etc.) and to import it into another server MUST be table stakes at this point. Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't repeat itself. I'll keep watching from the sidelines and see if the fundamental issues get resolved. It certainly will be interesting to see how things play out, that's for sure!
jillesvangurp 4y ago
I used this website a few days ago to find a suitable server: https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ And then https://movetodon.org/ https://movetodon.org/ to find some of my twitter contacts on mastodon. As for importing/exporting accounts, they have some documentation for that: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/
qudat 4y ago
The primary UX between servers is the "local feed." This is a feed dedicated to all posts within the server. You can't really access that feed from outside of a server. That's pretty much it. You can follow people on other servers, at-metnion, etc. Starting your own server is a waste of time, imo.
- proactivesvcs 4y ago
  Many servers allow their Local Timeline to be browsed by anyone. From the server's home page, click the "Local" button to the top-right. If you find a person or post you want to interact with, simply copy and paste its URL into the search bar of your app or home server.
  - toofy 4y ago
    not sure why they’re downvoting you, what you said is absolutely accurate.
    - proactivesvcs 4y ago
      I guess my month-long moratorium on bothering to contribute to any Fediverse-related conversation on HN needs to be maintained for a bit longer. Change is painful for many, particularly when they didn't think of it, or can't profit from it.
tedunangst 4y ago
And yet, you somehow managed to pick HN over reddit over TikTok or slack or discord or 100 other options. Or maybe all of the above. I'll never get the hand wringing over missing out on posts on some other server. There's tweets and reddits and tiktoks all over the place you'll never see. The lesson should be to make peace with that, not try to find them all.
rakoo 4y ago
> whether I should start my own server This is the right answer. All the questions about moderation, resources, choice and whatever will disappear and you'll be part of the Fediverse like anyone else.
- zeeZ 4y ago
  I wonder how easy it is for a small instance to get overwhelmed quickly, though. One of my responses to Nova got boosted by her, and my media storage and database size immediately spiked (600MiB to 1.3GiB and 20MiB to 42MiB). Requests went from none to 20/sec, just by that triggering more people to favorite and boost. I imagine if I ever manage to post something profound that someone with even greater influence happens to like, my server will be doomed.
  - rakoo 4y ago
    20 requests/sec is absolutely nothing for a server in 2022. Even if you have many relationships, any individual server will handle the load without any fuss. Worth that can happen is a few minutes in the propagation of messages, which is not exactly a big problem. Seriously, there is no technical reasons we don't self-host; only "cultural" ones (it's hard, it's work, it's painful, and such)

by dossy 4y ago

zimpenfish 4y ago

> which server I "should" join Any you want as long as you're happy with their rules. > whether I should start my own server It's currently faff (but potentially getting better.) > how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts). Can take a while for everything to filter through on busy servers though.

dossy 4y ago
> You can move your account with followers easily (but not posts). That's what I thought based on what I've read so far, thanks for confirming. Unless and until that's fixed, if I finally see enough value in joining Mastodon, I will have to do so using my own server where I have full access to all my content.
- vidarh 4y ago
  You can export all your content, including posts, but Mastodon doesn't support directly importing posts, so you need either a (very) friendly admin or your own server if you want to import it somewhere new.
  - pbronez 4y ago
    Yeah this is probably a needed feature. There are some good philosophical objections to post imports, but they’re overwhelmed by practical arguments for it. it’s a solvable problem.
    - vidarh 4y ago
      Absolutely agree. I think solutions will come, but they may well come as an extension or fork first until it's pointless for the core developers to resist. It's particularly idiotic because the Activities in the export are all signed, so an importing server just need to do a webfinger and profile lookup, and can then validate all of the posts. Of course you can still fake them, but if you show a "moved from <origin instance>" on them, that's really all you need to do - moves from, say, mastodon.social would be trustworthy, moves from some small instance would not. But even that can be fixed with tamper proof timestamps and signing the whole archive, and in any case you can validate this against the public API because it remains accessible on the origin server (at least for some time after the initial move, I don't know how long).
hombre_fatal 4y ago
That last point is a doozy. Mastodon servers can be as bad as subreddits with power tripping mods, and you don’t necessarily know that until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, just like on reddit. And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts. Going from one server (Twitter) to multiple smaller servers doesn’t seem to go far enough on the axis to address major issues that Twitter has. e.g. you still don’t “own” your content.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > e.g. you still don’t “own” your content. If you're not running your own server, true.
- dossy 4y ago
  > [...] until the day you cross a line that you didn’t know existed, [...] And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts. Exactly. This is the critical flaw in Mastodon's design. It does not solve the single biggest flaw in Twitter (or any other typical platform) design, where the platform operator owns the network, and not the author/user. This is why I won't bother investing my own personal time and effort in joining anyone else's server, given how the current design is implemented. It's sad that BitTorrent has now existed for 21 years, and still no one has built a social media content distribution network on top of it. I would have done it but I don't have the motivation to do it alone, as it would tilt control away from the platform operators who require that control in order to monetize the platform to make it worth the investment. :sigh:
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > And then your account gets nuked and you can’t migrate your posts. Well, you pretty much can't migrate your posts anyway even if you're moving without being nuked. But if you get nuked, you probably can't move your followers either which would suck.
  - toofy 4y ago
    does twitter have this problem solved?

CharlesW 4y ago

> Ned's spot on. Definitely. This is a great post that helps explain to technical folks why Mastodon is not (and will never be) a replacement for Twitter, which I say as a Mastodon user and fan. If something has a chance to displace Twitter, it'll need to be as dead-simple to use (like Hive¹). > The single thing that's kept me from joining/participating in Mastodon is the lack of clarity around which server I "should" join… If you're looking for an opinionated answer to this question by someone who's just gone through this, for HN readers I can also recommend the instance mentioned in the article: hachyderm.io. There are a lot of tech and otherwise-interesting people there, and it's run by Kris Nóva². Her most recent articles on Medium talk about running an instance as a serious endeavor. > …if I join someone else's server, how portable is my content/profile - can I export it all/import it all into my account on another server easily, or is that a lot of work, or even not possible at all? Kris's most recent post, "Experimenting with Federation and Migrating Accounts"³, goes into detail on how this works in practice. ¹ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/twitter-alternative-hive-jumps-to-top-20-on-the-u-s-app-store-after-surge-of-sign-ups/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/11/21/twitter-alternative-hive-j... ² SME in Linux kernel security, distributed systems and infrastructure management, and open-source software engineering. https://medium.com/@kris-nova https://medium.com/@kris-nova ³ https://medium.com/@kris-nova/experimenting-with-federation-and-migrating-accounts-eae61a688c3c https://medium.com/@kris-nova/experimenting-with-federation-...

dossy 4y ago
Thanks, @CharlesW. I'm familiar with Kris and follow her on Twitter, and see a lot of people have opted to join her Mastodon server, which is great, but her explanation of what happened when she tried to migrate her account from one server to another, where she even controlled both, points to the weakness in the fundamental Mastodon design that makes it a non-starter for me. Being able to export all of your data (posts, followers, following, blocks/mutes, etc.) and to import it into another server MUST be table stakes at this point. Otherwise, you're just trading one Twitter for another, which is foolish, because it means you wrongly believe that history doesn't repeat itself. I'll keep watching from the sidelines and see if the fundamental issues get resolved. It certainly will be interesting to see how things play out, that's for sure!

jillesvangurp 4y ago

I used this website a few days ago to find a suitable server: https://instances.social/ https://instances.social/ And then https://movetodon.org/ https://movetodon.org/ to find some of my twitter contacts on mastodon. As for importing/exporting accounts, they have some documentation for that: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/

qudat 4y ago

The primary UX between servers is the "local feed." This is a feed dedicated to all posts within the server. You can't really access that feed from outside of a server. That's pretty much it. You can follow people on other servers, at-metnion, etc. Starting your own server is a waste of time, imo.

proactivesvcs 4y ago
Many servers allow their Local Timeline to be browsed by anyone. From the server's home page, click the "Local" button to the top-right. If you find a person or post you want to interact with, simply copy and paste its URL into the search bar of your app or home server.
- toofy 4y ago
  not sure why they’re downvoting you, what you said is absolutely accurate.
  - proactivesvcs 4y ago
    I guess my month-long moratorium on bothering to contribute to any Fediverse-related conversation on HN needs to be maintained for a bit longer. Change is painful for many, particularly when they didn't think of it, or can't profit from it.

tedunangst 4y ago

And yet, you somehow managed to pick HN over reddit over TikTok or slack or discord or 100 other options. Or maybe all of the above. I'll never get the hand wringing over missing out on posts on some other server. There's tweets and reddits and tiktoks all over the place you'll never see. The lesson should be to make peace with that, not try to find them all.

rakoo 4y ago

> whether I should start my own server This is the right answer. All the questions about moderation, resources, choice and whatever will disappear and you'll be part of the Fediverse like anyone else.

zeeZ 4y ago
I wonder how easy it is for a small instance to get overwhelmed quickly, though. One of my responses to Nova got boosted by her, and my media storage and database size immediately spiked (600MiB to 1.3GiB and 20MiB to 42MiB). Requests went from none to 20/sec, just by that triggering more people to favorite and boost. I imagine if I ever manage to post something profound that someone with even greater influence happens to like, my server will be doomed.
- rakoo 4y ago
  20 requests/sec is absolutely nothing for a server in 2022. Even if you have many relationships, any individual server will handle the load without any fuss. Worth that can happen is a few minutes in the propagation of messages, which is not exactly a big problem. Seriously, there is no technical reasons we don't self-host; only "cultural" ones (it's hard, it's work, it's painful, and such)