13 ms·

We tried to run a social media site and it was awful

141 points by 6502nerdface 4y ago

7373737373 4y ago
I decided to remove a reddit-like forum and twitter-like personal feed from one of my websites, because moderating it quickly became hell on earth. Every rule (if you already have them) will be broken, and you will soon find yourself surrounded by a shitton of moral and legal dilemmas. Not to mention the insane amount of work and attention that has to be dedicated to it. It's a thankless job that never ends. Also, brace for people who have a different cultural, moral or legal understanding who want to argue against your (imperfect) decisions. It's a lot of responsibility and potential liability.
6502nerdface 4y ago
https://archive.ph/AoOno https://archive.ph/AoOno
xrayarx 4y ago
About running a mastodon instance Quote: "It is therefore with relief and regret that we announce the shutdown of Alphaville.club, this blog’s completely unofficial home on the Fediverse. Our reasons are listed below in full but, to summarise, Mastodon has proved more hassle than its worth."
- pmarreck 4y ago
  I mean, the relative cost really depends on how much you value having one up that you control, I suppose. I also think Pleroma or one of its forks (Akkoma, etc.) might be far less hassle to run while still being compatible with the same metaverse protocol, because Elixir (with erlang/OTP underneath) is far more resource-efficient than Ruby is (we're talking orders of magnitude more efficient in both CPU and memory efficiency, although content storage demands would likely remain necessary to keep a lasso on)
  - pja 4y ago
    Mastodon instances do seem to cache a /lot/ of content from peer servers in the interests of user-perceived latency.
JPLeRouzic 4y ago
> "After just a month our barely visible Fediverse presence was taking up 160 gigabytes"
- smcl 4y ago
  The "160 gigabytes" text was linked to the Johnny Mnemonic wikipedia page, so it it possible they're just exaggerating and meant "it was growing at a rate we didn't expect or couldn't really sustain"? This got me wondering, I created a Mastodon user @ defcon.social and my first couple of posts were images, just to test things out and get started with my chosen client - Ivory by Tapbots (the creators of Tweetdeck, RIP) after tptacek spoke glowingly of it here. Then I realised that by posting those I'm basically taking up space on a community service without paying for it, and I wasn't sure exactly what the etiquette was. On a commercial, monetised service like Twitter it's different as there are advertisers (or at least there were...) but afaik "defcon.social" is just a non-profit and I'd really like not to be a big cost sink. Also I wondered if there's any overhead involved in following users across many different instances - if my @defcon.social user follows a bunch of users on various other instances does that place additional burden on their mastodon instance or just on my local client? Might be time for me to read the defcon.social fine print and T&Cs (I only glanced over it) or even about Mastodon/ActivityPub generally...
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    From what I can gather every follower gets an individual copy of every post sent to their server who either deduplicates it and stores it in their database or just stores the message per subscriber. So if 10,000 people on server A subscribe to someone on server B then server B will send 10,000 duplicate messages to server A. I hope I’m wrong but that’s what I’ve heard.
    - stnmtn 4y ago
      Why are tech people so behind mastodon? If this is true this sounds incredibly worrying to scale; to the point where mastodon is limiting it's own growth potential
incomingpain 4y ago
Running an invisible forum with no engagement didn't even bring them close to the actual problems of running social media. When you're twitter or facebook, you literally have the FBI meeting with you regularly to censor speech. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62688532 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62688532 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files Democracy is a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. There will always be people who want to take away your freedom of speech; especially other countries. Any exception to freedom of speech basically can never be weaponized. "Hate Speech" is readily and easily weaponized against your political opponents. Everyone gets the right to speak or nobody does. Which is what we have right now. I realize where this post shall go. A democracy where you cannot speak to your political opponents is a democracy doomed to collapse.
- LBJsPNS 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - incomingpain 4y ago
    >Quack quack quack quack quack. You identify as a duck? The stated goal of HN is to enable conversations and prevent becoming an echo chamber. guess they failed.
    - LBJsPNS 4y ago
      Absurd premises receive absurd responses.
      - pessimizer 4y ago
        It's absurd that the FBI meets with social media regularly to discuss which accounts or ideas to minimize, prioritize, ban, or make immune from ban? Or is it absurd to think that people should hear from their political opponents?
    - axus 4y ago
recuter 4y ago
A paywalled article about neophytes rediscovering BBS culture isn't for everyone. This is the worst timeline.
- codetrotter 4y ago
  Without paywall: https://archive.is/vx6Sk https://archive.is/vx6Sk
imajoredinecon 4y ago
The tl;dr is “our lawyers and CEO hated it,” which is sad for the author who was just trying to have some harmless fun, but is not surprising.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  I think they also learned more about how toxic their active userbase actually is (I don't mean the general readership but people who comment.) You ever read the comments there? It's 100% trash.
  - Rastonbury 4y ago
    The comments went to trash ever since they sold subscriptions to universities, I am still upset about this. But yes they are not worth a peek these days
- yborg 4y ago
  Alternative title: "We casually decided to run a social media site for a starched-collar pillar of the financial reporting community, and all we got out of it was some clever snark."
  - KaiserPro 4y ago
    > clever snark Thats the entire point of ftalphaville. Its a great read, and free, barring email signup
zoobab 4y ago
Saved on Archive.is: https://archive.is/vx6Sk https://archive.is/vx6Sk
zoobab 4y ago
About the "Social media bosses face jail under amendment to UK online safety bill" https://archive.is/kJh46 https://archive.is/kJh46 At least with Nostr (compared to Mastodon) this won't be a problem anymore, at least some decent implementation of the declaration of independence of Cyberspace.
- zoobab 4y ago
  https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1617623779626352640 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1617623779626352640 "the problem is that most major states are pressuring corporations to limit speech."
  - WeylandYutani 4y ago
    No advertisers do. Look to 4chan for free speech. No company in their right mind wants to have anything to do with it. Corporations want family friendly sites with only happy thoughts.
    - Ralfp 4y ago
      I also want a fun place to procrastinate on but for some reason most vocal „internet free speech advocates” are also the people who insist my feed should be mostly political agitation, aggressive content that targets people or minorities and news to piss me off, otherwise I am one of the „sheeple”.
      - manimino 4y ago
        That description just sounds like regular news and social media.
        artificial 4y ago
        Once something becomes a number it ceases to be a metric? It's all about eyeballs and ads focused around engagement. Reminds me of a clip of dogs aggressively barking at one another behind a fence or glass door.
biorach 4y ago
> Meanwhile, for the benefit of... Morgan Stanley’s Distressed Debt & Special Situations team, here are a few things we learned about why taking responsibility for a social media site is a bad idea... that made me laugh out loud
IncRnd 4y ago
https://archive.is/20230125120906/https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788ebcd https://archive.is/20230125120906/https://www.ft.com/content...
edent 4y ago
There's a difference between running your own instance for you or your own staff and running one for the public. I should be able to follow @ClarkKent@mastodon.daily-planet.info - that'll tell me that the account is who it says it is. But mastodon.daily-planet.info absolutely shouldn't have a public registration. Running a social network isn't for the faint-hearted. But running a publishing platform should be as simple as running a website.
- dylan604 4y ago
  >But running a publishing platform should be as simple as running a website. Why is this consider stupidly easy? What kind of website are talking about, because the websites I run and have run in the past are not so simple
  - edent 4y ago
    I didn't say "stupidly easy". I said "as simple as". If you're running a basic WordPress / CMS - then running Mastodon should be as simple as that (i.e. pay someone to host and run). If you're running a global website with a load of subdomains, custom features, CDNs, etc - then running Mastodon should be as simple as your existing infrastructure.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - jermaustin1 4y ago
        WordPress is as easy as websites get. My 70 year old father runs a handful of them. They are 1 click to install, and have a built in plugin system to add extra features. Running WP is easy for the majority of users.
        TylerE 4y ago
        Yes. Until gramps forgets to update and he gets owned by scriptkiddies...usually via a hole in one of those plugins.
marban 4y ago
Mastodon is the move to Canada equivalent of social media.
- yborg 4y ago
  If 10M people moved to Canada its population would have increased by 25%.
- __derek__ 4y ago
  Mastodon instances are the (latest) new monorail.[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGg5rfBfWT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGg5rfBfWT4
andai 4y ago
> For obvious reasons, we can’t use big-tech’s trick of concentrating lobbying efforts by putting all our servers in Luxembourg or Ireland. Bullshit! I could do that, and I'm broke!
bryceelder 4y ago
Hello! Author of the story here. Happy to answer any questions. Though we all love archive.ph, FT Alphaville isn't behind a paywall. Email registration -- on the far right of the barrier page -- gives unlimited access. I set up the server during the peak exodus from Twitter. We use Twitter a lot, both to get stories out and to listen to readers, so the risk of it dying was very real. We made the decision to get a minimal-viable-product up asap, to give our Twitter refugee readers somewhere to go. Urgency to act meant avoiding committees and working the difficult stuff out later. But Twitter survived, 'Don user engagement was meh, and the difficult stuff became not worth it. The 160gb thing isn't just a Johnny Mnemonic reference. I'm a lazy coder who relies on cludges, so my 'Don deployment was a mess of duplication and surplus. About three weeks after launch the server hit 100% storage and crashed. I had the option of fixing the code or buying more space. Because I'm lazy I took the second option. A week later it hit 100% and crashed again. Though it was obvious the setup was broken, the long-term strategy of repair always lost out to the short-term fix of buying more space. We talked about keeping the server going but restricting it to staff only. Ultimately though, it still involved jumping through many hoops to make everything compliant, and while we all like the Fediverse to varying degrees it hasn't yet become essential to our work. We just couldn't justify the time required. Maybe the FT can be convinced into doing something official eventually. I'm certainly not against it, so long as I'm not involved in the IT or legal side.
- jph 4y ago
  Kudos Bryce for writing the story and also for posting here. This is a great story from the trenches.
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  whats the difference between mastodon and say the longroom(rip)? From what I remember Long room didn't have any outside moderators (like the comments section does) was it the sheer amount of content, or just that it was outside the sphere of support (both legal and technical) to be useful?
  - bryceelder 4y ago
    The Long Room was difficult for other reasons. Everything there was on FT webspace and was built by FT people, but with strictly limited access, so the compliance folks were comfortable. Moderation was light but within our control. Risks were known, therefore manageable. The eventual decision to kill LR was taken largely in the hope that we could replace it with something better. That's a work in progress.
motohagiography 4y ago
I could see them looking at HN and thinking, "FT readers are a cut above a bunch of computer repair people. Surely if they can have a civil public discourse, we can." They really do have some of the ingredients, but they are missing key ones. I'd say the biggest limitation to building a social platform from even as rarefied a captive demographic as their esteemed readership is that when your livelihood is based on relationships and narrative over concrete physical skills, the stakes on being controversial are too high. If you are a financial advisor and you are controversial in public and lose, among peers whose stock in trade is being aligned to the highest powers available, you lose your credibility and place in your pecking order. Whereas, if someone decides I'm on the wrong side of a narrative, I can still write code, build something, or make it work. Opinions are what we have when we're not actually doing the thing we have the opinion about, so it's my indulgence to be provocative about how well the world is being run - because I'm not the one doing it. All the world is indeed a stage, and getting all the best lines is almost fair compensation for having to put up with its managers. The issue of our time is that the people running the world think people like me have a bit too much freedom to mock their degenerate incompetence, and they think controlling public forums is going to be easier than doing a more credible job. There is an iron law about the trade off between autonomy and power, where power is to act through others, and autonomy is to act without others. Quality discourse (social media content), and news stories, require some kind of friction or conflict to make them interesting and compelling. This disqualifies powerful people from participating as themselves because the risk of alienating the people through whom they act is too high. (Musk is the exception that makes the rule.) The "social" in social media means that it's for kids and plebes like us who can afford to have drunk pictures of themselves on the internet because we aren't engaged in the all-against-all political power struggle that defines elite competition - the world most FT/Economist readers inhabit. My opinions have nothing to do with my ability to fix computers, where for the typical FT reader, their opinions signal their alignment, status, and reputation. They can't risk their reputations on making the kind of piquant online comment that makes this all so good. I'm glad they learned you can't just "start your own" social media platform, but that wasn't the real obstacle for them. It's that, they'll never (shit)post like common people.
shortformblog 4y ago
I just don’t get how a newspaper with a freaking comments section doesn’t understand the risk inherent with a social media website. If you break it down, a text-based comments section has many of the risks of a Mastodon server—people can share all manner of things. And worse, it’s actually centralized. If everyone was as risk-averse as the FT comes off in this article, we would not have any creations of note.
- gnz11 4y ago
  They know. Some editor saw the term "Mastadon" (or whatever other keywords) was trending and decided they needed to get some content up. Stuff like this is often content for the sake of content.
- glass3 4y ago
  If everyone was as risk-averse, laws would be either much more lenient or the internet would flourish in other countries. I don't get why newspapers don't use Mastodon as a standard for their comment sections. Social networks are all about credibility. By moderating their users and requiring a fee, newspapers could become the service for credible accounts and reclaim the social network space from Facebook.
  - shortformblog 4y ago
    I absolutely agree. I have said that federated social media is a great opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle and localize social media to some degree. The problem is that this is the mindset we’re up against. Again, the newspaper assuredly did all the homework around building policies around moderating social media decades ago. They just aren’t putting two and two together.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
millzlane 4y ago
Is it true that admins have access to DM's?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- est31 4y ago
  There seems to be no UI for it in the official mastodon code, but yes it's just one database lookup away (or a list of database lookups). I mean it's a common thing to not have end-to-end encryption. Gmail, Instagram, Discord, all can read DMs of logged in users. Something being open source doesn't mean it's end to end encrypted. Only some messengers have end to end encryption, like WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, etc. There are plans for mastodon to get E2EE as well, there is some backend work done but it seems to not be used in the mobile apps yet.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  Your content is in the admin's database. You basically just have to trust that the admin has no reason and incentive to read your DMs, edit your toots and so on.
bronikowski 4y ago
I run my one-person instance with gotosocial. Yeah, the attachments are a bit PITA. I'm federating with 167 other instances, I follow sub-100 people. gotosocial: du -h | tail -1 3.8G .
istillwritecode 4y ago
ft.com epitomizes what is wrong with web, with a big ass modal about cookies that only goes away if you accept their cookies. I would be happy to see such sites go bankrupt because they piss of so many potential readers who won't see their ads.

141 points by 6502nerdface 4y ago

I decided to remove a reddit-like forum and twitter-like personal feed from one of my websites, because moderating it quickly became hell on earth. Every rule (if you already have them) will be broken, and you will soon find yourself surrounded by a shitton of moral and legal dilemmas. Not to mention the insane amount of work and attention that has to be dedicated to it. It's a thankless job that never ends. Also, brace for people who have a different cultural, moral or legal understanding who want to argue against your (imperfect) decisions. It's a lot of responsibility and potential liability.

6502nerdface 4y ago

https://archive.ph/AoOno https://archive.ph/AoOno

xrayarx 4y ago

About running a mastodon instance Quote: "It is therefore with relief and regret that we announce the shutdown of Alphaville.club, this blog’s completely unofficial home on the Fediverse. Our reasons are listed below in full but, to summarise, Mastodon has proved more hassle than its worth."

pmarreck 4y ago
I mean, the relative cost really depends on how much you value having one up that you control, I suppose. I also think Pleroma or one of its forks (Akkoma, etc.) might be far less hassle to run while still being compatible with the same metaverse protocol, because Elixir (with erlang/OTP underneath) is far more resource-efficient than Ruby is (we're talking orders of magnitude more efficient in both CPU and memory efficiency, although content storage demands would likely remain necessary to keep a lasso on)
- pja 4y ago
  Mastodon instances do seem to cache a /lot/ of content from peer servers in the interests of user-perceived latency.

JPLeRouzic 4y ago

> "After just a month our barely visible Fediverse presence was taking up 160 gigabytes"

smcl 4y ago
The "160 gigabytes" text was linked to the Johnny Mnemonic wikipedia page, so it it possible they're just exaggerating and meant "it was growing at a rate we didn't expect or couldn't really sustain"? This got me wondering, I created a Mastodon user @ defcon.social and my first couple of posts were images, just to test things out and get started with my chosen client - Ivory by Tapbots (the creators of Tweetdeck, RIP) after tptacek spoke glowingly of it here. Then I realised that by posting those I'm basically taking up space on a community service without paying for it, and I wasn't sure exactly what the etiquette was. On a commercial, monetised service like Twitter it's different as there are advertisers (or at least there were...) but afaik "defcon.social" is just a non-profit and I'd really like not to be a big cost sink. Also I wondered if there's any overhead involved in following users across many different instances - if my @defcon.social user follows a bunch of users on various other instances does that place additional burden on their mastodon instance or just on my local client? Might be time for me to read the defcon.social fine print and T&Cs (I only glanced over it) or even about Mastodon/ActivityPub generally...
- UncleEntity 4y ago
  From what I can gather every follower gets an individual copy of every post sent to their server who either deduplicates it and stores it in their database or just stores the message per subscriber. So if 10,000 people on server A subscribe to someone on server B then server B will send 10,000 duplicate messages to server A. I hope I’m wrong but that’s what I’ve heard.
  - stnmtn 4y ago
    Why are tech people so behind mastodon? If this is true this sounds incredibly worrying to scale; to the point where mastodon is limiting it's own growth potential

incomingpain 4y ago

Running an invisible forum with no engagement didn't even bring them close to the actual problems of running social media. When you're twitter or facebook, you literally have the FBI meeting with you regularly to censor speech. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62688532 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-62688532 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter_Files Democracy is a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. There will always be people who want to take away your freedom of speech; especially other countries. Any exception to freedom of speech basically can never be weaponized. "Hate Speech" is readily and easily weaponized against your political opponents. Everyone gets the right to speak or nobody does. Which is what we have right now. I realize where this post shall go. A democracy where you cannot speak to your political opponents is a democracy doomed to collapse.

LBJsPNS 4y ago
[flagged]
- incomingpain 4y ago
  >Quack quack quack quack quack. You identify as a duck? The stated goal of HN is to enable conversations and prevent becoming an echo chamber. guess they failed.
  - LBJsPNS 4y ago
    Absurd premises receive absurd responses.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      It's absurd that the FBI meets with social media regularly to discuss which accounts or ideas to minimize, prioritize, ban, or make immune from ban? Or is it absurd to think that people should hear from their political opponents?
  - axus 4y ago

recuter 4y ago

A paywalled article about neophytes rediscovering BBS culture isn't for everyone. This is the worst timeline.

codetrotter 4y ago
Without paywall: https://archive.is/vx6Sk https://archive.is/vx6Sk

imajoredinecon 4y ago

The tl;dr is “our lawyers and CEO hated it,” which is sad for the author who was just trying to have some harmless fun, but is not surprising.

guerrilla 4y ago
I think they also learned more about how toxic their active userbase actually is (I don't mean the general readership but people who comment.) You ever read the comments there? It's 100% trash.
- Rastonbury 4y ago
  The comments went to trash ever since they sold subscriptions to universities, I am still upset about this. But yes they are not worth a peek these days
yborg 4y ago
Alternative title: "We casually decided to run a social media site for a starched-collar pillar of the financial reporting community, and all we got out of it was some clever snark."
- KaiserPro 4y ago
  > clever snark Thats the entire point of ftalphaville. Its a great read, and free, barring email signup

zoobab 4y ago

Saved on Archive.is: https://archive.is/vx6Sk https://archive.is/vx6Sk

zoobab 4y ago

About the "Social media bosses face jail under amendment to UK online safety bill" https://archive.is/kJh46 https://archive.is/kJh46 At least with Nostr (compared to Mastodon) this won't be a problem anymore, at least some decent implementation of the declaration of independence of Cyberspace.

zoobab 4y ago
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1617623779626352640 https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1617623779626352640 "the problem is that most major states are pressuring corporations to limit speech."
- WeylandYutani 4y ago
  No advertisers do. Look to 4chan for free speech. No company in their right mind wants to have anything to do with it. Corporations want family friendly sites with only happy thoughts.
  - Ralfp 4y ago
    I also want a fun place to procrastinate on but for some reason most vocal „internet free speech advocates” are also the people who insist my feed should be mostly political agitation, aggressive content that targets people or minorities and news to piss me off, otherwise I am one of the „sheeple”.
    - manimino 4y ago
      That description just sounds like regular news and social media.
      - artificial 4y ago
        Once something becomes a number it ceases to be a metric? It's all about eyeballs and ads focused around engagement. Reminds me of a clip of dogs aggressively barking at one another behind a fence or glass door.

biorach 4y ago

> Meanwhile, for the benefit of... Morgan Stanley’s Distressed Debt & Special Situations team, here are a few things we learned about why taking responsibility for a social media site is a bad idea... that made me laugh out loud

IncRnd 4y ago

https://archive.is/20230125120906/https://www.ft.com/content/8d995a24-d77c-4208-a3a6-603d8788ebcd https://archive.is/20230125120906/https://www.ft.com/content...

edent 4y ago

There's a difference between running your own instance for you or your own staff and running one for the public. I should be able to follow @ClarkKent@mastodon.daily-planet.info - that'll tell me that the account is who it says it is. But mastodon.daily-planet.info absolutely shouldn't have a public registration. Running a social network isn't for the faint-hearted. But running a publishing platform should be as simple as running a website.

dylan604 4y ago
>But running a publishing platform should be as simple as running a website. Why is this consider stupidly easy? What kind of website are talking about, because the websites I run and have run in the past are not so simple
- edent 4y ago
  I didn't say "stupidly easy". I said "as simple as". If you're running a basic WordPress / CMS - then running Mastodon should be as simple as that (i.e. pay someone to host and run). If you're running a global website with a load of subdomains, custom features, CDNs, etc - then running Mastodon should be as simple as your existing infrastructure.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - jermaustin1 4y ago
      WordPress is as easy as websites get. My 70 year old father runs a handful of them. They are 1 click to install, and have a built in plugin system to add extra features. Running WP is easy for the majority of users.
      - TylerE 4y ago
        Yes. Until gramps forgets to update and he gets owned by scriptkiddies...usually via a hole in one of those plugins.

marban 4y ago

Mastodon is the move to Canada equivalent of social media.

yborg 4y ago
If 10M people moved to Canada its population would have increased by 25%.
__derek__ 4y ago
Mastodon instances are the (latest) new monorail.[1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGg5rfBfWT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGg5rfBfWT4

andai 4y ago

> For obvious reasons, we can’t use big-tech’s trick of concentrating lobbying efforts by putting all our servers in Luxembourg or Ireland. Bullshit! I could do that, and I'm broke!

bryceelder 4y ago

Hello! Author of the story here. Happy to answer any questions. Though we all love archive.ph, FT Alphaville isn't behind a paywall. Email registration -- on the far right of the barrier page -- gives unlimited access. I set up the server during the peak exodus from Twitter. We use Twitter a lot, both to get stories out and to listen to readers, so the risk of it dying was very real. We made the decision to get a minimal-viable-product up asap, to give our Twitter refugee readers somewhere to go. Urgency to act meant avoiding committees and working the difficult stuff out later. But Twitter survived, 'Don user engagement was meh, and the difficult stuff became not worth it. The 160gb thing isn't just a Johnny Mnemonic reference. I'm a lazy coder who relies on cludges, so my 'Don deployment was a mess of duplication and surplus. About three weeks after launch the server hit 100% storage and crashed. I had the option of fixing the code or buying more space. Because I'm lazy I took the second option. A week later it hit 100% and crashed again. Though it was obvious the setup was broken, the long-term strategy of repair always lost out to the short-term fix of buying more space. We talked about keeping the server going but restricting it to staff only. Ultimately though, it still involved jumping through many hoops to make everything compliant, and while we all like the Fediverse to varying degrees it hasn't yet become essential to our work. We just couldn't justify the time required. Maybe the FT can be convinced into doing something official eventually. I'm certainly not against it, so long as I'm not involved in the IT or legal side.

jph 4y ago
Kudos Bryce for writing the story and also for posting here. This is a great story from the trenches.
KaiserPro 4y ago
whats the difference between mastodon and say the longroom(rip)? From what I remember Long room didn't have any outside moderators (like the comments section does) was it the sheer amount of content, or just that it was outside the sphere of support (both legal and technical) to be useful?
- bryceelder 4y ago
  The Long Room was difficult for other reasons. Everything there was on FT webspace and was built by FT people, but with strictly limited access, so the compliance folks were comfortable. Moderation was light but within our control. Risks were known, therefore manageable. The eventual decision to kill LR was taken largely in the hope that we could replace it with something better. That's a work in progress.

motohagiography 4y ago

I could see them looking at HN and thinking, "FT readers are a cut above a bunch of computer repair people. Surely if they can have a civil public discourse, we can." They really do have some of the ingredients, but they are missing key ones. I'd say the biggest limitation to building a social platform from even as rarefied a captive demographic as their esteemed readership is that when your livelihood is based on relationships and narrative over concrete physical skills, the stakes on being controversial are too high. If you are a financial advisor and you are controversial in public and lose, among peers whose stock in trade is being aligned to the highest powers available, you lose your credibility and place in your pecking order. Whereas, if someone decides I'm on the wrong side of a narrative, I can still write code, build something, or make it work. Opinions are what we have when we're not actually doing the thing we have the opinion about, so it's my indulgence to be provocative about how well the world is being run - because I'm not the one doing it. All the world is indeed a stage, and getting all the best lines is almost fair compensation for having to put up with its managers. The issue of our time is that the people running the world think people like me have a bit too much freedom to mock their degenerate incompetence, and they think controlling public forums is going to be easier than doing a more credible job. There is an iron law about the trade off between autonomy and power, where power is to act through others, and autonomy is to act without others. Quality discourse (social media content), and news stories, require some kind of friction or conflict to make them interesting and compelling. This disqualifies powerful people from participating as themselves because the risk of alienating the people through whom they act is too high. (Musk is the exception that makes the rule.) The "social" in social media means that it's for kids and plebes like us who can afford to have drunk pictures of themselves on the internet because we aren't engaged in the all-against-all political power struggle that defines elite competition - the world most FT/Economist readers inhabit. My opinions have nothing to do with my ability to fix computers, where for the typical FT reader, their opinions signal their alignment, status, and reputation. They can't risk their reputations on making the kind of piquant online comment that makes this all so good. I'm glad they learned you can't just "start your own" social media platform, but that wasn't the real obstacle for them. It's that, they'll never (shit)post like common people.

shortformblog 4y ago

I just don’t get how a newspaper with a freaking comments section doesn’t understand the risk inherent with a social media website. If you break it down, a text-based comments section has many of the risks of a Mastodon server—people can share all manner of things. And worse, it’s actually centralized. If everyone was as risk-averse as the FT comes off in this article, we would not have any creations of note.

gnz11 4y ago
They know. Some editor saw the term "Mastadon" (or whatever other keywords) was trending and decided they needed to get some content up. Stuff like this is often content for the sake of content.
glass3 4y ago
If everyone was as risk-averse, laws would be either much more lenient or the internet would flourish in other countries. I don't get why newspapers don't use Mastodon as a standard for their comment sections. Social networks are all about credibility. By moderating their users and requiring a fee, newspapers could become the service for credible accounts and reclaim the social network space from Facebook.
- shortformblog 4y ago
  I absolutely agree. I have said that federated social media is a great opportunity to put the genie back in the bottle and localize social media to some degree. The problem is that this is the mindset we’re up against. Again, the newspaper assuredly did all the homework around building policies around moderating social media decades ago. They just aren’t putting two and two together.
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millzlane 4y ago

Is it true that admins have access to DM's?

deleted 4y ago
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est31 4y ago
There seems to be no UI for it in the official mastodon code, but yes it's just one database lookup away (or a list of database lookups). I mean it's a common thing to not have end-to-end encryption. Gmail, Instagram, Discord, all can read DMs of logged in users. Something being open source doesn't mean it's end to end encrypted. Only some messengers have end to end encryption, like WhatsApp, Threema, Signal, etc. There are plans for mastodon to get E2EE as well, there is some backend work done but it seems to not be used in the mobile apps yet.
Hamuko 4y ago
Your content is in the admin's database. You basically just have to trust that the admin has no reason and incentive to read your DMs, edit your toots and so on.

bronikowski 4y ago

I run my one-person instance with gotosocial. Yeah, the attachments are a bit PITA. I'm federating with 167 other instances, I follow sub-100 people. gotosocial: du -h | tail -1 3.8G .

istillwritecode 4y ago

ft.com epitomizes what is wrong with web, with a big ass modal about cookies that only goes away if you accept their cookies. I would be happy to see such sites go bankrupt because they piss of so many potential readers who won't see their ads.