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Server stats say movetodon.org reached a new record of 49k users yesterday

209 points by mariuz 4y ago

GenerocUsername 4y ago
- scrollaway 4y ago
  Seven. What’s the point of asking an irrelevant question nobody has an answer to?
- jeromegv 4y ago
  It's a tool to migrate who you follow from twitter to mastodon. This isn't about how many new users joined Mastodon (which yes, would include bots). Your comment is entirely irrelevant.
323 4y ago
It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  That's a feature, not a bug. Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small. Consider running your own for your friends.
  - nerdponx 4y ago
    Or pay a hosting company to run one for you. At least you get to control your own community and moderation. Even if you are still subject to the whims of your hosting company, you still retain a fair amount of autonomy unless you are running a community like Kiwifarms (in which case I find it hard to be sympathetic anyway), or your hosting company happens to be located in a jurisdiction with enforced censorship laws.
    - drstewart 4y ago
      Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating their own social feed! This is a bulletproof plan that really understands consumer behavior.
      - vorpalhex 4y ago
        Who says unpaid? Make your friends buy you dinner or throw some cash your way. One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can experiment with new payment models.
        BoorishBears 4y ago
        I can't tell if this is satire in response to sarcasm, could you clarify?
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        Not satire! You're providing a real service to your friends - a mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them to do so. How you do this is up to you. I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8 folks who play on it with regularity. For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food, either cooking for each other or catching dinner out. That works well for my friend group and I perceive this as fair. Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion, whatever). There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can be run.
        BoorishBears 4y ago
        Then it's not really a good faith reply to their point is it? The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation. Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics. A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive sounds like a pretty awful product.
  - BoorishBears 4y ago
    I mean you're certainly free to paint it as a feature, but Mastodon is getting pushed very heavily by many Mastodon users to Twitter users as a backup (see "movetodon.org", which starts with "Log in with twitter") so I the scaling issues deserve more than the "that's a feature!" I see thrown at every person who brings them up > Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small. Certainly doesn't vibe with the project owners pushing a set of "blessed" servers to every visitor: https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers I think this is the biggest reason Mastodon will stay a fringe platform. No one who enjoys it will accept anything of its issues as valid criticism, and if you point out the fact that such a mentality will keep it from getting popular, the reply will be "good! I don't want it to get big!" Meanwhile the project itself very clearly wants to get popular, and it's clearly being sponsored with the intent that it should become more and more relevant, much to the chagrin of those who were using it before it was cool. It seems like eventually the cool kids who start to shut out the new kids to stave off an Eternal September, leaving the project in an awkward spot and a steady decline for everyone involved as the old guard shifts energy to building taller and taller fences around their respective echo chambers. (Now what was that about registrations again?)
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Serious question: if a community is so small as to be just your friends, why not start a Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord group? Free, fully managed, content preserved, well established.
    - OctopusLupid 4y ago
      Don't forget Matrix.
- DiNovi 4y ago
  it’s not built to scale as a feature. it won’t be the twitter replacement but some people might stay once they understand the benefits of small niche communities
- EarlKing 4y ago
  I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding costs money, and there's plenty of content out there with zero seeders. You'd think that would clue people in that this isn't going to work, but there it is. Hell, you'd think the history of Usenet and FidoNet would've given people a clue, but nobody wants to hear that either. If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time. That is the ultimate lesson of the Fediverse.
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    Twitter only works because it is centralized. The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. On the technical side, the whole thing is lossy as hell. If I view a foreign profile on my instance it shows a handful of posts and then says that "older posts" aren't shown from other instances. Then if I go to the other instance there are hundreds of posts that aren't older, they were just missing on my instance. None of it really works or makes any sense.
    - phoe-krk 4y ago
      > And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. Didn't you just describe Twitter?
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
- kirbyfan64sos 4y ago
  It's because most of the servers are not nearly on the level of setup that a normal large-scale social network would probably need...which in turn is also because a lot of them have been run by hobbyists and the like, which in turn is also because no one ever needed to scale it this high before.
- ls15 4y ago
  > What if 100 mil users want to move? Some of the new users will have to run new servers. For example if public officials are moving to Mastodon, I expect the state to run their own servers. It was never a good idea to allow Twitter to be a platform for (semi-)official communication.
  - fleddr 4y ago
    Which will then need to federate to most other instances, causing an unmanagable load?
    - shapefrog 4y ago
      Is the problem of scale a) broadcasting the one person that millions of people want to see the tweets of or b) millions of people recieving the tweets of one person?
      - fleddr 4y ago
        If my understanding of ActivityPub is correct, it's B.
    - ls15 4y ago
      They don't have to federate to everyone. If the government does not want to put public communication into the hands of tech billionaires again, their second best option after using available software is to build a platform from scratch.
- phoe-krk 4y ago
  It's an error to treat the Fediverse as you would treat Twitter, where there is a singular platform in some way external to its users. Fediverse is a mesh network with single-user instances being feasible. If a single node has problems scaling, split it up. If a whole network has problems scaling, add more nodes. Fediverse is not yet at levels where the whole network is congested, either.
  - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
    This makes the network congestion exponentially worse. It’s not scalable.
    - phoe-krk 4y ago
      Email mailing groups figured out a way of scaling despite the same sort of exponential congestion. If anything, Fediverse traffic between larger clusters may eventually ossify around some larger pipes, not unlike the Internet traffic being handled by backbone operators.
      - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
  - georgyo 4y ago
    This is a nice thought, but reality is always different. A really popular person might have many millions of followers on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes. That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image. You can say that a single user should not have that many followers, however the root of the issue is that mastodon will have some scaling issues.
    - phoe-krk 4y ago
      Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to https://mas.to getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If anything, it can be treated as a technological problem, solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting their own instance as already suggested several times on the Fediverse. The Fediverse will eventually establish a concrete way for handling that sort of matters.
- jancsika 4y ago
  Have you submitted a bug report? :)
- jshen 4y ago
  Twitter didn’t scale for many years. Remember the fail whale?
- mempko 4y ago
  Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable. Why doesn't anyone remember how shitty Twitter was when it was growing. Slow and constantly breaking. Mastodon is working fine even after millions moved to it. Yes, Admins had to scale up, but they did it. I like that I pay my admin. No ads. No bullshit.
  - rvz 4y ago
    > Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable. I don’t see any normal person self-hosting their own email service. Even if they did, good luck with handling spam. It can only viably scale to hundreds of millions with centralization; hence Gmail, Outlook, etc to reduce / limit the spam issue. Mastodon has the same mistakes as the other federated alternatives and has already proven to be unable to scale more efficiently than Twitter, let alone the ridiculous hurdles to begin using it. We are talking about scaling to hundreds of millions, not ten thousand or a shy hundred thousand and it falls over on a single moderator’s instance.
    - radley 4y ago
      > I don’t see any normal person self-hosting their own email service. But email didn't fail as a result. Just as you said, email services popped up. Just give it a little time.
      - rvz 4y ago
        > But email didn't fail as a result. Just as you said, email services popped up. With centralization; hence the spyware, bans and spam prevention which only benefits the big centralized email services like Gmail, Outlook, etc. Email was meant to be used as a decentralized protocol such that one can operate their own email service; but despite many here claiming to run their own, they gave up and many still won't. Even sending an email to a Gmail and Outlook addresses will just fail their spam filter test. So it has been a failure for email without centralizated providers. > Just give it a little time. A 6 year federated experiment is not early days to see that a worse version of Twitter has already failed.
  - 4y ago
- guerrilla 4y ago
  New instances will be (are being) created. Supply will fill demand.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > What if 100 mil users want to move? Then supply and demand will dictate that people will start paying for accounts, and that will be a good thing.
- radley 4y ago
  This is like saying email can't scale. Of course Mastodon can scale, especially for those businesses willing to do it as a service. It's an entirely new, legitimate territory.
- sangnoir 4y ago
  > What if 100 mil users want to move? Tumblr will be happy to host them! Matt[1] from Automattic has stated that Tumblr will be joining the Fediverse soon. 1. https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1594577983028740096 https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1594577983028740096
- wfaler 4y ago
  A couple of things: * It's mostly hobbyists running their instances, some literally in their basement. * Most scaling glitches have usually been addressed within a few days. The comparison to early-day Twitter is fair, maybe people have literally not expected such a fast scaling route. * I don't think anyone in their wildest fever-dreams expected Elon Musk to burn down Twitter this fast, thus causing a mass-migration.
- vlugorilla 4y ago
  This is why Nostr is the way
cbozeman 4y ago
Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.
- UncleOxidant 4y ago
  I hope Mastodon doesn't "replace" twitter (as in becomes like twitter). So far Mastodon is much nicer than twitter so I hope Mastodon stays like it is and is something better than twitter had become.
- abdullahkhalids 4y ago
  Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.
  - drewzero1 4y ago
    People have been putting check mark emojis in their Fedi display names forever, as a joke. While I could see an instance considering something like that to help pay for server costs I don't think it's likely to be very popular.
  - Shank 4y ago
    There are already badges that people have. For example, on brands.town, Fox News has a verified badge [0]. [0]: https://brands.town/@FoxNews https://brands.town/@FoxNews
    - phoe-krk 4y ago
      These badges are emoji - currently e.g. https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf has three of them. That's 200% more than you can get on Twitter, and $8 cheaper, too. Actual verification happens via proving that you control a website that links back to your Mastodon profile - see e.g. https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-website https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-websi...
ajross 4y ago
The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events. And... I've done all that on Mastodon, successfully, over the past few weeks. And it's been Just Fine! No outages, no weirdness. Big chunks of the accounts I'm following have moved over and/or started mirroring their tweets. I see maybe 30% of the volume of "readworthy Toots" that I do on Twitter. It's really extremely usable. I hasn't replaced Twitter yet for me. But... it certainly could.
- spaceribs 4y ago
  It also ignores the hilariously terrible time Twitter had scaling up in the first few years of it's life.
  - nerdawson 4y ago
    Is that relevant though? Twitter is stable (enough) now. It's competing against present day Twitter, not the Twitter of years past.
    - zimpenfish 4y ago
      > It's competing against present day Twitter Sure but that has the caveat that 75% of the staff were recently let go, the owner is an attention-deficit "BREAK THINGS AND BREAK FAST" lunatic whiplashing back and forth over policy changes and bans, and as such, people using the Fediverse have a certain tolerance for glitchiness because it's better than the alternative right now.
- standardUser 4y ago
  How could it replace Twitter? Even the Mastodon devotees admit it can't scale to that level and the sign-up process will turn off most users before they even get started.
mempko 4y ago
The discussions how a decentralized system like Mastodon won't work reminds me of the early days of networks. People were saying the same thing about the web and the internet and claiming CompuServe and AOL would dominate. Twitter is like CompuServe and AOL, Mastodon is like the internet. One based on proprietary systems, the other based on open standards like ActivityPub. History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile.
- adamrezich 4y ago
  > History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile. but how many people today use Discord et al. compared to IRC? I think the centralized-decentralized thing is a cycle, not a one-way logical progression.
  - OctopusLupid 4y ago
    My comment is uninformed, but I feel like centralised companies have the R&D resources to create innovation, which communities then steal (in a good way) to make the technology free (as in freedom) for everyone. That's why there's a cycle.
- boredhedgehog 4y ago
  > Mastodon is like the internet Which is why I believe that once the fediverse has fractured along ideological lines, as it inevitably must, the end result won't look much different from the old internet: big influencers running their own site/blog, with loose connections to ideological allies and a bunch of commenters in orbit.
  - rsynnott 4y ago
    I mean, arguably that has _already happened_; it's just that the Big Two far-right mastodon instances (Gab and Truth Social) do not federate. Note that Gab actually used to.
  - OkayPhysicist 4y ago
    IMO, the most likely result is one or more large, heavily connected meshes centered around an ideological middle ground of significantly online people (probably divided by liberal/conservative ideology), sparsely connected to somewhat more fringe instances (maybe a socialist instance that doesn't restrict overt calls to violence, but is still largely ideologically acceptable to the average liberal), and some archipelagos/unfederated instances of even more fringe social groups. And that's a good thing. Individuals get to choose servers that align with their views on moderation and morality, server moderators only need to deal with occasional maliciousness rather than trying to walk a fine line of tolerance, and your social group isn't at risk of being disrupted by a billionaire moving in and blowing it up.
EamonnMR 4y ago
My biggest gripe is that (afaik) there's no 'view other server's timeline' view-you need to actually go to that server, then back to yours when you want to follow someone. Instances are becoming sort of like meta-hashtags so I hope that gets added eventually.
- aprilnya 4y ago
  why not look at actual hashtags (and if you’re on mastodon 4+, you can even follow them)?
  - EamonnMR 4y ago
    People aren't great at using them yet. Anyway, the instances bring together a bunch of different topics broader than a single hashtag would collect, like infosec.exchange and sdf for tech stuff.
- viraptor 4y ago
  There are apps which allow you to do that. Can't remember the name now, but check the feature sets, it was a popular one.
alkonaut 4y ago
Movetodon lists all my Twitter follows and their corresponding mastodon handles but the tool doesn’t let me follow them? Clicking the mastod name leads to a as 404 and that’s it? I was hoping to be able to just say ”follow all” or at least do it one by one. Am I not holding it right.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  It did for me. I just did "follow all" again. You sure some extension isn't interfering?
  - alkonaut 4y ago
    I don’t see any options or ”follow all” at all, just a list of accounts. This is safari on iOS 15. The only two buttons are “Logout” and “Hide followed accounts”
    - guerrilla 4y ago
      There was a "follow all" and one "follow" button for each person for me in Firefox on Desktop/Linux. Try FF or Cr?
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        Ok I’ll just try on desktop when I’m at one. Thanks.
        alkonaut 4y ago
        Indeed, the last column with the buttons that was hidden in iOS Safari shows up on Edge/Chrome desktop.
- tick_tock_tick 4y ago
  Most of the mastodon ecosystem is semi functional at best right now. They got a small herd of people showing up which means pretty much all the existing capacity is full so stuff is breaking left and right. Give it a few months and a fraction of the people still interested can probably sign up without issues.
jscipione 4y ago
[flagged]
- notpachet 4y ago
  > exposing the greatest human rights violation in American history through the Twitter Files scandal I don't usually reply in these Twitter threads, but cmon... surely you can see what a ridiculous hyperbole this is? American history includes: > Mass enslavement > Incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII > Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in war > Torture programs > Blacklisting of (ostensible) communists during the McCarthy era > Extermination and displacement of Native Americans And that's just to name a few off the top of my head.
  - jscipione 4y ago
    None of those were a constitutional crisis except mass enslavement and the Constitution in that case was on the side of the slavers. Joe Biden is the worst President in American history no hyperbole. Hacker News mods are clearly on the side of censorship.
dchuk 4y ago
I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  But why switch? Ie what is the reason i'm switching, that some new centralized Twitter clone wouldn't also potentially suffer from?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- makeee 4y ago
  The value is the network and it's hard to get a person's entire network to move over at once. You're right that most people don't care about "decentralization", but they really care about not losing access to their account, avoiding hate/bullying, and many other things. A Mastodon type decentralized platform where you join the server that best aligns best with your interests/needs is one way to solve this. More friction though, so not sure on what will win out.
- Zak 4y ago
  The value of Twitter is in the network of people who use it, not the software or infrastructure that runs it. No matter how easy it was to migrate, nobody would do it unless everybody did it. Something like you're describing would have a better chance of succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and networks with Mastodon. There's probably a userbase for a product like that (but not necessarily a business model).
  - conductr 4y ago
    Would be interesting if the top, say 20-100, most followed all banded together and left to a clone that they owned. It would make enough chatter to create a wave. Not sure how it would end or if they could run it profitably, but would be interesting to see that happen is all (IMO as a non-twitter user).
jarbus 4y ago
How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of email? Hadn’t the success of email already shown that it’s possible to scale decentralized protocols?
- Ciantic 4y ago
  It's possible, but there is no advertisements, and most servers are run by volunteers. Right now, with current tech stack, which isn't most efficient I heard Leo Laporte who runs TWiT Podcast network and ~5000 user https://twit.social https://twit.social server it costs him 380 dollars / month for fully hosted using https://masto.host https://masto.host server. Sure it can scale, it's not harder than newsletters, but it needs money, I have serious doubts it can scale without advertisements.
  - progval 4y ago
    It doesn't cost that much when properly configured and on dedicated hardware. My own instance, oc.todon.fr (running since 2017 and with currently ~2500 users), runs on a 5€/month server (HTTP front-end) and less than a quarter of the resources of a 800€ server at home.
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of email? Hadn’t the success of email already shown that it’s possible to scale decentralized protocols? It's only kinda decentralized now. Email massively re-centralized around gmail and a few other providers.
shapefrog 4y ago
Whoever threw too much money at clubhouse at the top valuation should have them start an excluseive, private, invitation only mastodon server. Like clubhouse was before mere mortals could join.
- radley 4y ago
  Or just make it open like Gmail and get 100,000x the users.
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    That is the kind of thinking that made clubhouse, once valued at 4bn, worth 0bn.
  - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
    GMail was invite only, limited signup for the first 12 months, which is what got people to move from Hotmail and Yahoo, the big ones.
snvzz 4y ago
If I was in charge of Twitter, I'd remake it so that it's just a Mastodon server. Suddenly, no reason to migrate to another server, as you can just stay in the biggest one and keep your clout. Google pulled off something similar with gtalk and XMPP. Remember Jabber?
- colinsane 4y ago
  i remember. but was google "successful" with that approach? XMPP is a pretty niche thing, but i can count at least a couple friends who use it on occasion, whereas i haven't heard a single person near me mention gtalk in years.
  - NoahKAndrews 4y ago
    Google killed Google Talk in favor of Google Hangouts, which they recently also killed in favor of Google Chat. XMPP federation died with Google Talk.
- tommica 4y ago
  But what about tracking and ads? Would be difficult to track users that are in a different instance, with no way of showing ads to them - not sure twitter could survive without that. Idea itself is a neat one though.
krainboltgreene 4y ago
It's kinda blowing my mind how little HN posters understand Twitter's value and position.

209 points by mariuz 4y ago

scrollaway 4y ago
Seven. What’s the point of asking an irrelevant question nobody has an answer to?
jeromegv 4y ago
It's a tool to migrate who you follow from twitter to mastodon. This isn't about how many new users joined Mastodon (which yes, would include bots). Your comment is entirely irrelevant.

323 4y ago

It seems the Mastodon ecosystem has serious problems scaling. Most of the servers are closed to registrations, and we are just talking about a couple million new users over 2 months. What if 100 mil users want to move? Are we going to relive the Twitter history, which crashed every time Justin Bieber tweeted?

vorpalhex 4y ago
That's a feature, not a bug. Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small. Consider running your own for your friends.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Or pay a hosting company to run one for you. At least you get to control your own community and moderation. Even if you are still subject to the whims of your hosting company, you still retain a fair amount of autonomy unless you are running a community like Kiwifarms (in which case I find it hard to be sympathetic anyway), or your hosting company happens to be located in a jurisdiction with enforced censorship laws.
  - drstewart 4y ago
    Exactly. The average person is dying to pay to have the privilege of an extra job moderating and administrating their own social feed! This is a bulletproof plan that really understands consumer behavior.
    - vorpalhex 4y ago
      Who says unpaid? Make your friends buy you dinner or throw some cash your way. One of the benefits of the fediverse is that you can experiment with new payment models.
      - BoorishBears 4y ago
        I can't tell if this is satire in response to sarcasm, could you clarify?
        vorpalhex 4y ago
        Not satire! You're providing a real service to your friends - a mastodon server. It takes real time, real skill and real money (buying hardware or renting a vps) to do this. Your friends should compensate you and it's fair to ask them to do so. How you do this is up to you. I host a gameserver for my friends. This is a really nice bit of hardware in a datacenter. It costs me $600 a year directly and maybe 4-6 hours a month. I have about 8 folks who play on it with regularity. For my friend group, we "compensate" via trading food, either cooking for each other or catching dinner out. That works well for my friend group and I perceive this as fair. Your friend group may be different. You may literally ask them to throw in $5 a month or maybe you trade services (your barber friend gives you a free haircut on occasion, whatever). There isn't a magic equation of what is fair or right for your circumstance.. and it's ok to experiment. Part of why the fediverse is good is that these experiments can be run.
        BoorishBears 4y ago
        Then it's not really a good faith reply to their point is it? The problem presented wasn't how you pay, it's the fact that you pay and take on moderation duties and curation. Getting reimbursed by friends doesn't change that, and if anything it convolutes the latter part of the problem by leaving the door open to some awkward dynamics. A centralized group chat that needs funding to stay alive sounds like a pretty awful product.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  I mean you're certainly free to paint it as a feature, but Mastodon is getting pushed very heavily by many Mastodon users to Twitter users as a backup (see "movetodon.org", which starts with "Log in with twitter") so I the scaling issues deserve more than the "that's a feature!" I see thrown at every person who brings them up > Each server in the fediverse should stay relatively small. Certainly doesn't vibe with the project owners pushing a set of "blessed" servers to every visitor: https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers I think this is the biggest reason Mastodon will stay a fringe platform. No one who enjoys it will accept anything of its issues as valid criticism, and if you point out the fact that such a mentality will keep it from getting popular, the reply will be "good! I don't want it to get big!" Meanwhile the project itself very clearly wants to get popular, and it's clearly being sponsored with the intent that it should become more and more relevant, much to the chagrin of those who were using it before it was cool. It seems like eventually the cool kids who start to shut out the new kids to stave off an Eternal September, leaving the project in an awkward spot and a steady decline for everyone involved as the old guard shifts energy to building taller and taller fences around their respective echo chambers. (Now what was that about registrations again?)
- fleddr 4y ago
  Serious question: if a community is so small as to be just your friends, why not start a Whatsapp, Telegram, Discord group? Free, fully managed, content preserved, well established.
  - OctopusLupid 4y ago
    Don't forget Matrix.
DiNovi 4y ago
it’s not built to scale as a feature. it won’t be the twitter replacement but some people might stay once they understand the benefits of small niche communities
EarlKing 4y ago
I've tried telling people before that the Fediverse doesn't scale, that decentralized solutions where nobody is paying for anything only work for flashcrowds (i.e. torrents), and ultimately this is going nowhere... but nobody wants to hear it. Everyone is sure that "torrents work, so this will work", neverminding the fact that the entire peer-to-peer ecosystem only works as long as there are people to seed, seeding costs money, and there's plenty of content out there with zero seeders. You'd think that would clue people in that this isn't going to work, but there it is. Hell, you'd think the history of Usenet and FidoNet would've given people a clue, but nobody wants to hear that either. If you're not willing to pay for the services you require... you're going to have a bad time. That is the ultimate lesson of the Fediverse.
- jeffbee 4y ago
  Twitter only works because it is centralized. The fediverse works less and less well as the number of federated instances increase. It has anti-scaling properties. And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. On the technical side, the whole thing is lossy as hell. If I view a foreign profile on my instance it shows a handful of posts and then says that "older posts" aren't shown from other instances. Then if I go to the other instance there are hundreds of posts that aren't older, they were just missing on my instance. None of it really works or makes any sense.
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    > And, on the non-technical side, it has a disorganized anonymous set of moderators you've never met or ever heard of, with no particular guiding philosophy or rules, and these guys have total access to your profile and they can do anything they want. Didn't you just describe Twitter?
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      Nobody knows what the hell is going on with MuskBird, but when it was still Twitter there was a two-sided terms of service, under which Twitter offered its users concrete, enumerated benefits. Mastodon instances do not have "terms of service" they have "rules". The "rules" are unilateral in that they bind the user and not the service provider. The entire model is strictly worse for the user than Twitter was.
kirbyfan64sos 4y ago
It's because most of the servers are not nearly on the level of setup that a normal large-scale social network would probably need...which in turn is also because a lot of them have been run by hobbyists and the like, which in turn is also because no one ever needed to scale it this high before.
ls15 4y ago
> What if 100 mil users want to move? Some of the new users will have to run new servers. For example if public officials are moving to Mastodon, I expect the state to run their own servers. It was never a good idea to allow Twitter to be a platform for (semi-)official communication.
- fleddr 4y ago
  Which will then need to federate to most other instances, causing an unmanagable load?
  - shapefrog 4y ago
    Is the problem of scale a) broadcasting the one person that millions of people want to see the tweets of or b) millions of people recieving the tweets of one person?
    - fleddr 4y ago
      If my understanding of ActivityPub is correct, it's B.
  - ls15 4y ago
    They don't have to federate to everyone. If the government does not want to put public communication into the hands of tech billionaires again, their second best option after using available software is to build a platform from scratch.
phoe-krk 4y ago
It's an error to treat the Fediverse as you would treat Twitter, where there is a singular platform in some way external to its users. Fediverse is a mesh network with single-user instances being feasible. If a single node has problems scaling, split it up. If a whole network has problems scaling, add more nodes. Fediverse is not yet at levels where the whole network is congested, either.
- hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
  This makes the network congestion exponentially worse. It’s not scalable.
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    Email mailing groups figured out a way of scaling despite the same sort of exponential congestion. If anything, Fediverse traffic between larger clusters may eventually ossify around some larger pipes, not unlike the Internet traffic being handled by backbone operators.
    - hejaodbsidndbd 4y ago
- georgyo 4y ago
  This is a nice thought, but reality is always different. A really popular person might have many millions of followers on tens or hundreds of thousands of nodes. That person then boosts a post from another server and they have effectively DDOSed that server. All the other nodes will start querying that server about that post or image. You can say that a single user should not have that many followers, however the root of the issue is that mastodon will have some scaling issues.
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    Yes, and we're already seeing it e.g. with https://mas.to https://mas.to getting hugged to death because of pg joining it. If anything, it can be treated as a technological problem, solvable e.g. by (theorizing now) splitting a single instance over a series of machines, or a social problem, by (not theorizing anymore) a famous enough person hosting their own instance as already suggested several times on the Fediverse. The Fediverse will eventually establish a concrete way for handling that sort of matters.
jancsika 4y ago
Have you submitted a bug report? :)
jshen 4y ago
Twitter didn’t scale for many years. Remember the fail whale?
mempko 4y ago
Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable. Why doesn't anyone remember how shitty Twitter was when it was growing. Slow and constantly breaking. Mastodon is working fine even after millions moved to it. Yes, Admins had to scale up, but they did it. I like that I pay my admin. No ads. No bullshit.
- rvz 4y ago
  > Really? Email scaled. Internet scaled. Decentralization is scalable. I don’t see any normal person self-hosting their own email service. Even if they did, good luck with handling spam. It can only viably scale to hundreds of millions with centralization; hence Gmail, Outlook, etc to reduce / limit the spam issue. Mastodon has the same mistakes as the other federated alternatives and has already proven to be unable to scale more efficiently than Twitter, let alone the ridiculous hurdles to begin using it. We are talking about scaling to hundreds of millions, not ten thousand or a shy hundred thousand and it falls over on a single moderator’s instance.
  - radley 4y ago
    > I don’t see any normal person self-hosting their own email service. But email didn't fail as a result. Just as you said, email services popped up. Just give it a little time.
    - rvz 4y ago
      > But email didn't fail as a result. Just as you said, email services popped up. With centralization; hence the spyware, bans and spam prevention which only benefits the big centralized email services like Gmail, Outlook, etc. Email was meant to be used as a decentralized protocol such that one can operate their own email service; but despite many here claiming to run their own, they gave up and many still won't. Even sending an email to a Gmail and Outlook addresses will just fail their spam filter test. So it has been a failure for email without centralizated providers. > Just give it a little time. A 6 year federated experiment is not early days to see that a worse version of Twitter has already failed.
- 4y ago
guerrilla 4y ago
New instances will be (are being) created. Supply will fill demand.
rglullis 4y ago
> What if 100 mil users want to move? Then supply and demand will dictate that people will start paying for accounts, and that will be a good thing.
radley 4y ago
This is like saying email can't scale. Of course Mastodon can scale, especially for those businesses willing to do it as a service. It's an entirely new, legitimate territory.
sangnoir 4y ago
> What if 100 mil users want to move? Tumblr will be happy to host them! Matt[1] from Automattic has stated that Tumblr will be joining the Fediverse soon. 1. https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1594577983028740096 https://twitter.com/photomatt/status/1594577983028740096
wfaler 4y ago
A couple of things: * It's mostly hobbyists running their instances, some literally in their basement. * Most scaling glitches have usually been addressed within a few days. The comparison to early-day Twitter is fair, maybe people have literally not expected such a fast scaling route. * I don't think anyone in their wildest fever-dreams expected Elon Musk to burn down Twitter this fast, thus causing a mass-migration.
vlugorilla 4y ago
This is why Nostr is the way

cbozeman 4y ago

Mastodon is not and will not ever be a replacement for Twitter. Twitter's too large and the people who had bleu checks before the $7.99 fee are addicted to attention, validation, and/or lording their bleu check status over others. That's why Mastodon won't replace it. Sure, a few small (relative to Twitter) alternative Mastodon instances will pop up, but no real challenger or contender for the throne.

UncleOxidant 4y ago
I hope Mastodon doesn't "replace" twitter (as in becomes like twitter). So far Mastodon is much nicer than twitter so I hope Mastodon stays like it is and is something better than twitter had become.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
Not that I necessarily want this feature implemented or that this is a good idea, but I can foresee some large Mastodon instances asking for X dollars a month to put a blue check mark in front of your name.
- drewzero1 4y ago
  People have been putting check mark emojis in their Fedi display names forever, as a joke. While I could see an instance considering something like that to help pay for server costs I don't think it's likely to be very popular.
- Shank 4y ago
  There are already badges that people have. For example, on brands.town, Fox News has a verified badge [0]. [0]: https://brands.town/@FoxNews https://brands.town/@FoxNews
  - phoe-krk 4y ago
    These badges are emoji - currently e.g. https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf has three of them. That's 200% more than you can get on Twitter, and $8 cheaper, too. Actual verification happens via proving that you control a website that links back to your Mastodon profile - see e.g. https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-website https://opensource.com/article/22/11/verified-mastodon-websi...

ajross 4y ago

The pessimism of the comments here confuses me. In fact, Mastodon has handled this extraordinarily well, as I see it. I'm very much in the "median Twitter user" bucket: I don't post much, I have a feed of a few hundred accounts that I follow because I want to hear what they have to say, and I browse the feed once or twice on most days to catch up, with occasionally binges during newsworthy events. And... I've done all that on Mastodon, successfully, over the past few weeks. And it's been Just Fine! No outages, no weirdness. Big chunks of the accounts I'm following have moved over and/or started mirroring their tweets. I see maybe 30% of the volume of "readworthy Toots" that I do on Twitter. It's really extremely usable. I hasn't replaced Twitter yet for me. But... it certainly could.

spaceribs 4y ago
It also ignores the hilariously terrible time Twitter had scaling up in the first few years of it's life.
- nerdawson 4y ago
  Is that relevant though? Twitter is stable (enough) now. It's competing against present day Twitter, not the Twitter of years past.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > It's competing against present day Twitter Sure but that has the caveat that 75% of the staff were recently let go, the owner is an attention-deficit "BREAK THINGS AND BREAK FAST" lunatic whiplashing back and forth over policy changes and bans, and as such, people using the Fediverse have a certain tolerance for glitchiness because it's better than the alternative right now.
standardUser 4y ago
How could it replace Twitter? Even the Mastodon devotees admit it can't scale to that level and the sign-up process will turn off most users before they even get started.

mempko 4y ago

The discussions how a decentralized system like Mastodon won't work reminds me of the early days of networks. People were saying the same thing about the web and the internet and claiming CompuServe and AOL would dominate. Twitter is like CompuServe and AOL, Mastodon is like the internet. One based on proprietary systems, the other based on open standards like ActivityPub. History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile.

adamrezich 4y ago
> History showed that centralization is ultimately extremely fragile. but how many people today use Discord et al. compared to IRC? I think the centralized-decentralized thing is a cycle, not a one-way logical progression.
- OctopusLupid 4y ago
  My comment is uninformed, but I feel like centralised companies have the R&D resources to create innovation, which communities then steal (in a good way) to make the technology free (as in freedom) for everyone. That's why there's a cycle.
boredhedgehog 4y ago
> Mastodon is like the internet Which is why I believe that once the fediverse has fractured along ideological lines, as it inevitably must, the end result won't look much different from the old internet: big influencers running their own site/blog, with loose connections to ideological allies and a bunch of commenters in orbit.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  I mean, arguably that has _already happened_; it's just that the Big Two far-right mastodon instances (Gab and Truth Social) do not federate. Note that Gab actually used to.
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  IMO, the most likely result is one or more large, heavily connected meshes centered around an ideological middle ground of significantly online people (probably divided by liberal/conservative ideology), sparsely connected to somewhat more fringe instances (maybe a socialist instance that doesn't restrict overt calls to violence, but is still largely ideologically acceptable to the average liberal), and some archipelagos/unfederated instances of even more fringe social groups. And that's a good thing. Individuals get to choose servers that align with their views on moderation and morality, server moderators only need to deal with occasional maliciousness rather than trying to walk a fine line of tolerance, and your social group isn't at risk of being disrupted by a billionaire moving in and blowing it up.

EamonnMR 4y ago

My biggest gripe is that (afaik) there's no 'view other server's timeline' view-you need to actually go to that server, then back to yours when you want to follow someone. Instances are becoming sort of like meta-hashtags so I hope that gets added eventually.

aprilnya 4y ago
why not look at actual hashtags (and if you’re on mastodon 4+, you can even follow them)?
- EamonnMR 4y ago
  People aren't great at using them yet. Anyway, the instances bring together a bunch of different topics broader than a single hashtag would collect, like infosec.exchange and sdf for tech stuff.
viraptor 4y ago
There are apps which allow you to do that. Can't remember the name now, but check the feature sets, it was a popular one.

alkonaut 4y ago

Movetodon lists all my Twitter follows and their corresponding mastodon handles but the tool doesn’t let me follow them? Clicking the mastod name leads to a as 404 and that’s it? I was hoping to be able to just say ”follow all” or at least do it one by one. Am I not holding it right.

guerrilla 4y ago
It did for me. I just did "follow all" again. You sure some extension isn't interfering?
- alkonaut 4y ago
  I don’t see any options or ”follow all” at all, just a list of accounts. This is safari on iOS 15. The only two buttons are “Logout” and “Hide followed accounts”
  - guerrilla 4y ago
    There was a "follow all" and one "follow" button for each person for me in Firefox on Desktop/Linux. Try FF or Cr?
    - alkonaut 4y ago
      Ok I’ll just try on desktop when I’m at one. Thanks.
      - alkonaut 4y ago
        Indeed, the last column with the buttons that was hidden in iOS Safari shows up on Edge/Chrome desktop.
tick_tock_tick 4y ago
Most of the mastodon ecosystem is semi functional at best right now. They got a small herd of people showing up which means pretty much all the existing capacity is full so stuff is breaking left and right. Give it a few months and a fraction of the people still interested can probably sign up without issues.

jscipione 4y ago

[flagged]

notpachet 4y ago
> exposing the greatest human rights violation in American history through the Twitter Files scandal I don't usually reply in these Twitter threads, but cmon... surely you can see what a ridiculous hyperbole this is? American history includes: > Mass enslavement > Incarceration of Japanese-Americans during WWII > Hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in war > Torture programs > Blacklisting of (ostensible) communists during the McCarthy era > Extermination and displacement of Native Americans And that's just to name a few off the top of my head.
- jscipione 4y ago
  None of those were a constitutional crisis except mass enslavement and the Constitution in that case was on the side of the slavers. Joe Biden is the worst President in American history no hyperbole. Hacker News mods are clearly on the side of censorship.

dchuk 4y ago

I don’t understand why someone hasn’t just launched a full blown clone of twitter yet. The decentralized stuff doesn’t matter to basically all of the population. Twitter is not an advanced product concept. A competent team can clone it quickly. Make it easy to migrate your past tweets over, maybe some way to migrate your connections, boom.

unshavedyak 4y ago
But why switch? Ie what is the reason i'm switching, that some new centralized Twitter clone wouldn't also potentially suffer from?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
makeee 4y ago
The value is the network and it's hard to get a person's entire network to move over at once. You're right that most people don't care about "decentralization", but they really care about not losing access to their account, avoiding hate/bullying, and many other things. A Mastodon type decentralized platform where you join the server that best aligns best with your interests/needs is one way to solve this. More friction though, so not sure on what will win out.
Zak 4y ago
The value of Twitter is in the network of people who use it, not the software or infrastructure that runs it. No matter how easy it was to migrate, nobody would do it unless everybody did it. Something like you're describing would have a better chance of succeeding given an existing network to talk to. If you want to make a Twitter clone with good import tools, it's more likely to succeed if it speaks ActivityPub and networks with Mastodon. There's probably a userbase for a product like that (but not necessarily a business model).
- conductr 4y ago
  Would be interesting if the top, say 20-100, most followed all banded together and left to a clone that they owned. It would make enough chatter to create a wave. Not sure how it would end or if they could run it profitably, but would be interesting to see that happen is all (IMO as a non-twitter user).

jarbus 4y ago

How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of email? Hadn’t the success of email already shown that it’s possible to scale decentralized protocols?

Ciantic 4y ago
It's possible, but there is no advertisements, and most servers are run by volunteers. Right now, with current tech stack, which isn't most efficient I heard Leo Laporte who runs TWiT Podcast network and ~5000 user https://twit.social https://twit.social server it costs him 380 dollars / month for fully hosted using https://masto.host https://masto.host server. Sure it can scale, it's not harder than newsletters, but it needs money, I have serious doubts it can scale without advertisements.
- progval 4y ago
  It doesn't cost that much when properly configured and on dedicated hardware. My own instance, oc.todon.fr (running since 2017 and with currently ~2500 users), runs on a 5€/month server (HTTP front-end) and less than a quarter of the resources of a 800€ server at home.
tablespoon 4y ago
> How does scaling laws of the fediverse differ to scaling laws of email? Hadn’t the success of email already shown that it’s possible to scale decentralized protocols? It's only kinda decentralized now. Email massively re-centralized around gmail and a few other providers.

shapefrog 4y ago

Whoever threw too much money at clubhouse at the top valuation should have them start an excluseive, private, invitation only mastodon server. Like clubhouse was before mere mortals could join.

radley 4y ago
Or just make it open like Gmail and get 100,000x the users.
- shapefrog 4y ago
  That is the kind of thinking that made clubhouse, once valued at 4bn, worth 0bn.
- TheHappyOddish 4y ago
  GMail was invite only, limited signup for the first 12 months, which is what got people to move from Hotmail and Yahoo, the big ones.

snvzz 4y ago

If I was in charge of Twitter, I'd remake it so that it's just a Mastodon server. Suddenly, no reason to migrate to another server, as you can just stay in the biggest one and keep your clout. Google pulled off something similar with gtalk and XMPP. Remember Jabber?

colinsane 4y ago
i remember. but was google "successful" with that approach? XMPP is a pretty niche thing, but i can count at least a couple friends who use it on occasion, whereas i haven't heard a single person near me mention gtalk in years.
- NoahKAndrews 4y ago
  Google killed Google Talk in favor of Google Hangouts, which they recently also killed in favor of Google Chat. XMPP federation died with Google Talk.
tommica 4y ago
But what about tracking and ads? Would be difficult to track users that are in a different instance, with no way of showing ads to them - not sure twitter could survive without that. Idea itself is a neat one though.

krainboltgreene 4y ago

It's kinda blowing my mind how little HN posters understand Twitter's value and position.