19 ms·

Mastodon is doomed?

• heyitsols 3y ago
  Disingenuous to say that mastodon.lol shut down “because of Harry Potter” when in actual fact it was a disgusting and prolonged character assassination attempt against the sole admin
• transfire 4y ago
  One of the reasons we need faster upload speeds, so people can host from home.
  • duxup 4y ago
    This seems pretty wild to me that for say a social network I need fast upload speeds.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • turnsout 4y ago
      Once you implement a basic ActivityPub server, you realize you're basically asking for a friendly DDoS. If you toot a photo to 1000 followers, your server needs to blast it out to every unique instance in that list of 1000, then ask for whatever updates they have. It's not "efficient," but the upside is that it's conceptually very simple.
      • zimpenfish 4y ago
        > If you toot a photo to 1000 followers, your server needs to blast it out to every unique instance in that list of 1000 I might be misunderstanding here but if you make a status with a photo, it doesn't attach the literal bytes of the photo but the URL to your local copy of the photo which may, admittedly, by fetched 1000 times by those instances if someone on each of those instances looks at it. cf https://octodon.social/@pzmyers/110265584018863694 https://octodon.social/@pzmyers/110265584018863694 which has the link //assets.octodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/265/581/155/000/717/original/0b24824d56920b79.jpeg and also a preview link of https://assets.octodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/265/581/155/000/717/original/0b24824d56920b79.jpeg https://assets.octodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/26....
        • turnsout 4y ago
          Unfortunately, what happens is that (for some reason), instances cache remote media. So if I'm on rando.zyx, it will download and cache the image from octodon.social for local rando.zyx users.
          • KomoD 4y ago
            It's not just images either, it's the same with link previews, so any link that gets posted will get visited by the instances your instance is federated with, it's even worse when you post a link to a video. Small example log: https://pastebin.com/raw/jYZ1z8dG https://pastebin.com/raw/jYZ1z8dG I've seen some cases where there's been 1000+ requests to a site just because a link to it was posted.
            • zimpenfish 4y ago
              Now that is a problem. But people have suggested workable solutions and hopefully at some point, the Mastodon authors will pull their heads out of their hole and get on with implementing something. I wouldn't hold my breath, mind.
              • KomoD 4y ago
                Earlier today I posted a link to a video on my webserver, all the instances hammered me so hard it maxed out my 1gbps connection
                • zimpenfish 4y ago
                  It's been an issue since 2017[1] (since moved to [2]) but the discussion always devolves into "but what if someone LIES in the federated preview??!!?!" bikeshedding. [1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486 [2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662
          • zimpenfish 4y ago
      • bee_rider 4y ago
        It is a funny that from our point of view, sending out to the internet has one flat cost. Most of my friends (people who would be interested in my photos) live in the same state as me. A bunch live in the same or adjacent towns…
  • afavour 4y ago
    Home upload speeds aren’t holding that back. Hardware is. What is the average social media user going to host their Mastodon instance on? I wish it were possible to run mini-servers on something like an Apple TV, goodness knows there’s enough CPU going spare there most of the time. Or that ISPs shipped routers capable of it. But alas most people don’t have sufficiently open hardware just sitting around at home.
    • porkbeer 4y ago
      My upload speeds, that I pay 120/mo for, are under 300kb. Boradband in america is largely a joke. I have only one provider in my area under 200/mo.
    • zimpenfish 4y ago
      > What is the average social media user going to host their Mastodon instance on? A Raspberry Pi? https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi (Sadly no AkkomaPi yet, it seems.)
      • afavour 4y ago
        I love the idea of it. The average user is never going to do it. > Unzip the image and install it to an SD card OK, you'll lose some people here but a lot could handle that > Configure your WiFi by editing pleromapi-wpa-supplicant.txt Aaand they're gone
    • kornhole 4y ago
      Run Yunohost on any SBC or old laptop you have laying around. That is what I do.
  • zirgs 4y ago
    Many ISPs forbid web hosting from home.
  • JustSomeNobody 4y ago
    CGNAT needs to die as well.
    • mvanbaak 4y ago
      THIS!
  • poulpy123 4y ago
    except that nobody wants to host its own server, just a minority of minority of geeks
• al2o3cr 4y ago
  If you don’t know what PgBouncer or Sidkiq are in 2023 I wouldn’t invest a ton of time in learning them now. Yeah, who needs those proven tools? I'm sure Justin can suggest you an AWS alternative that'll 100% lock you in and then go directly from "beta" to "unsupported legacy" after you adopt it. Have fun! /s
• turnsout 4y ago
  The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc. We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic centralized social media platforms, but if we peek over our recency bias, we can see that it wasn't always that way.
  • amadeuspagel 4y ago
    It wasn't always this way because it was never technologically possible.
  • dustymcp 3y ago
    i liked forums alot better for specialized content, i have no interest in the cesspools of unoriginal content that is social media.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is there. No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people, or to follow 20 different celebrities they like. There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.
    • textfiles 4y ago
      Admin/Veteran of small social networks over the last 30 years here. Yes there are.
      • turnsout 4y ago
        Definitely—there are so many thriving fora that were around before Facebook, and will be full of activity long after Meta has been delisted.
    • femiagbabiaka 4y ago
      There’s this thing called IRC…
• some_furry 4y ago
  Despite all this gloom and doom talk, this essay ends with, "Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have lots of happy users." What does doomed mean then, Justin? For contrast, "No VC will dump loads of money into it" isn't exactly a gloomy forecast.
  • yborg 4y ago
    It's a gloomy forecast if you're a hype cycle grifter or some rando looking to become a platform influencer. Now you have to find some other bandwagon to climb on.
• PinguTS 4y ago
  This article reads like the first articles about Twitter.
  • duxup 4y ago
    I'm not sure that makes sense. I can't imagine discussing twitter in the early days and how users / communities have to manage servers / are shutting down, etc.
    • yborg 4y ago
      You obviously weren't on Twitter in the early days of the Failwhale and "Twitter will never scale." In fact, the original Ruby implementation didn't scale and was eventually discarded. The same thing will happen with Mastodon if it becomes necessary.
• afavour 4y ago
  I really wish Mastodon wasn’t absorbing 95% of the ActivityPub hype because everything in this article is correct. The good news is that there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn’t use Ruby and Postgres. Every story I hear about backlogs of Sidekiq jobs in Mastodon instances makes it feel like a nightmare. More broadly though I think Mastodon is going to fail as a mass thing because it isn’t actually what people want. A lot of recent arrivals want Twitter without the corporate ownership but Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with inefficient links between them rather than one whole. You can’t even see all the replies to a message by default, it only shows you on-instance replies! And how any brand new user is supposed to knowledgeably choose an instance is a mystery to me. Even as a veteran user I find the instance system awkward. I have many interests, how do I pick an instance to be my home? Should it be a web dev instance? A music instance? In some ways I prefer the idea of signing up on both and having people be able to follow me based on topic interest but Mastodon doesn't really have a good concept of unifying profiles in that way. Not to mention I'd then be paying to support two instances instead of one.
  • zimpenfish 4y ago
    > there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn’t use Ruby and Postgres There's Akkoma (Elixir, Postgres) or GotoSocial (Go, SQLite) or Takahe (Python, Postgres) and probably some I've not even encountered as yet. 'KomoD and 'RobotToaster remind me of Pleroma (Elixir, Postgres) which Akkoma was forked from.
    • KomoD 4y ago
      There's also Pleroma
      • kkklppubgdzs 4y ago
        Some Mastodon instances block all Pleroma instances because they don't like the developer's politics though so you have to keep that in mind
• fallat 4y ago
  There will and probably already are server implementations that are resource minimal and easy setup. There's nothing about ActivityPub that stops this.
• Ciantic 4y ago
  Interestingly today's Vergecast episode "ActivityPub is the next big thing in social" [1] touched on monetization. What I understood from Mike Cue, the monetization implementations won't come from Mastodon, but from established companies building new things, like Flipboard or Medium. They are also thinking what needs to be added to protocol to support monetization. IMO it doesn't need any features for monetization. ActivityPub allows creators to create accounts and allow only paid followers, or send their toots to payed subset of followers. Problem is what servers would the masses gather? Who ever is the biggest node will of course set the rules. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/activitypub-is-the-next-big-thing-in-social/id430333725?i=1000610671175 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/activitypub-is-the-nex...
  • segasaturn 4y ago
    Tumblr is adopting ActivityPub and will become the largest node on the network when its completed.
    • mariusor 4y ago
      Did anything happen in this direction since Mullenweg said they're going to add support? I am skeptical of them following through with it.
• brycewray 4y ago
  Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701341
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > All of those “features” come with with a heavy price—responsibility. This is the issue with many of these types of services. Geeks love them; but no one else does. I don't like running a VPS or an AWS instance, because of all the overhead, so I tend to use shared hosting. I'm quite capable of running a VPS, but I can't be arsed. I suspect that we'll be seeing some fairly large corporate Mastodon servers (like...say...Twitter). These are likely to be popular.
  • local_crmdgeon 4y ago
    I've said this before on my throwaways - this is the same logic as Bitcoin. I don't want more responsibility, I want to use a service that works. Also, like BTC, the whole thing is network effects, and barriers to entry dramatically curtail networks. People like Twitter because celebrities and journalists use it, not because of the data model.
    • smoldesu 4y ago
      HN has an API and a search database connected to it, but it's also "a service that works". It's not as complicated as Bitcoin, everything is abstracted as a simple account/forum system. The non-user-facing complexity is high, but the user-facing complexity is minimum. That's what ActivityPub integration is going to look like, IMO. With companies like Flipboard and Tumblr adding integration, it's undeniable that the network is growing (even if it's not it's strong suit). For people who want an RSS-style feed with light interactive elements, it's a dream come true. Maybe that encompasses Twitter users, maybe it doesn't.
  • hinkley 4y ago
    We need some turnkey VPS hardware, and a lot of these problems would be greatly reduced.
  • safety1st 4y ago
    None of that was enough to stop email. Free is a very good price. Once it was obvious that emailing was a thing many people wanted to do, and a free server became available, servers started springing up all over the place, many more implementations of the underlying protocols were developed, businesses figured out various ways to monetize, the standards evolved (somewhat). Now let's do an inventory on ActivityPub... 1) It became obvious that tweeting was a thing many people wanted to do? Check 2) A free server became available? Check 3) Servers started springing up all over the place? Check https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/mastodon_herd_1.png https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/m... 4) More implementations were developed? That's where we are now 5, 6) Stay tuned
• actionfromafar 4y ago
  As far as hosting costs per user go, I think the Mastodon software could be implemented in a much more efficient manner. There are already alternative, working proof-of-concepts which are much leaner. As far moderation, that's a harder thing to handle. Don't know really.
• duxup 4y ago
  I don't care about the title. The opening of this article really applies to me. I don't want to manage a social network. I don't want to have to worry about the stability, politics, drama of the network I chose and so on... Moderation, even if imperfect, is a big selling point for me, even if I don't like to think about it being so.
  • madeofpalk 4y ago
    just go join mastodon.social then.
• criddell 4y ago
  > With no income potential. Why is there no income potential? It seems to me that if Mastodon grows, there’s lots of income potential.
  • prmoustache 4y ago
    I guess what he means is that the software itself doesn't provide any management for payment/subscription for access or features nor any advertising management.
  • rvz 4y ago
    > It seems to me that if Mastodon grows, there’s lots of income potential. That is 7 years of "If", and all we get is instance takeovers, [0] where companies buy and own the users on multiple instances from the admins. If you are an admin with 1M registered users, you can sell them to the highest bidder. If you are a user, you get nothing. So much for the nonsense of "Social networking that's not for sale" as a tag line. [0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquires-pawoonet-one-of-the-largest-mastodon-instances-301707919.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquir...
• tedivm 4y ago
  I'm all for valid criticism, but this read more like a rant (a rather long one at that). I think it's interesting that they used hachyderm as an example of why things don't scale, when that organization has managed to build a robust platform and nonprofit based off of user contributions.
• jszymborski 4y ago
  There are plenty of sustainable Mastodon instances that are run by a cooperative of users. Social.coop has been running for ages and is very active. Members pay a pay-what-you-can fee to join the member-run coop. It works super well, and they always have a surplus they're looking to reinvest. I'm on a canadian coop instance that launched a few months ago (@jszym@cosocial.ca). If you're a cannuck, consider joining!
• weavie 4y ago
  What is the biggest resource bottleneck in Mastodon? Like, are the certain design decisions that could be optimised to make it more resource efficient? Is it just because it is written in Ruby? Is there something inherent to ActivityPub that means it has to use a lot of resources? Can work be done to make it cheaper to run?
  • simonw 4y ago
    ActivityPub involves a HUGE number of HTTP requests. Every time you create a post your server has to deliver that post via HTTP to every other instance that has at least one of your followers - this can quickly grow to hundreds of deliveries if you have a few thousand followers. Mastodon uses a Sidekiq queue and Ruby threads to handle these deliveries. I have a strong hunch that switching to delivery through a more efficient mechanism - async IO, or a lower level language - could have a big impact there. My web browser doesn't blink at loading 100 resources to render a web page, so delivering a few hundred HTTP requests shouldn't be impossibly hard to scale, even when you take retries into account.
    • weavie 3y ago
      I see. So essentially the issue is built in to the way Activity Pub is designed. It is a scaling issue. Your browser may not blink at loading 100 resources, but say you were constantly reloading 100s of tabs, it would start to grind down. Rewriting in a more efficient language would help, but that would just mean it would start to grind down when you have 20,000 users rather than 10,000. I'm surprised it doesn't do some kind of batching peer to peer communication instead. Maybe that wouldn't be as real time. Thanks for the insight.
• zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale. I mean, sure, maybe, if you're running the huge and clunky Mastodon source. Akkoma is much easier. GotoSocial is even easier again. Honk, assuming you don't need MastoAPI support, is even easier still since it comes bundled with its own UI. It'd be easier to take the article seriously if it wasn't blinkered from the get-go.
• mberlove 4y ago
  Probably like a number of users here, I used mastodon "before it was cool" -- and it was never in reality an "alt twitter", it was its own microblogging service, with niche communities, and with its own set of pros and cons. IMHO the hopes of an influx of users to make it the next Twitter doesn't change the fundament of what Mastodon represents. The author's statement that Mastodon's CEO has "no plans for monotization [sic]" does not, in my take, reduce the benefits of open-source & federated communities one iota.
  • sdfghswe 4y ago
    Mastodon's is decentralized, why would you monotize it?
• SkyMarshal 4y ago
  It seems like most Twitter power users who prioritize easy setup, UX, and audience access, and who don’t really care about federation, are migrating to Substack Notes.
• drivebyops 4y ago
  Substack is the real 2008 Twitter alternative, having more people in a platform is a anti-feature
• simonw 4y ago
  Bit of a weird post. "All of the 3rd party integrations are happening with ActivityPub, not Mastodon." That right there is the solution to most of the author's complaints! I for one would be completely satisfied with this outcome: I don't care about Mastodon, I care about the Fediverse concept generally. Mainly I want a way of publishing and consuming short-form content that's immune from being bought and ruined by a capricious billionaire.
• dkuntz2 4y ago
  this whole article is literally FUD. "some instances shut down", "there might be a CVE and everyone will reevaluate", "moderation isn't centralized"
• foul 4y ago
  If someone wishes for a thriving Fediverse, Mastodon HAS to die. And Misskey and Pleroma (and Akkoma, and Takahe) too. The way these apps are shaped requires a subscription model or a big thankless spender to keep them afloat, they will sooner or later be the reason for more siloing incidents and creation of new walled gardens. I already know most of the users have no alternative, but still.
• hinkley 4y ago
  News flash: tech and fads change constantly on the internet. Almost everything is “doomed”.
• bhouston 4y ago
  Mastodon is doing fine. It is vibrant with a ton of activity. Mastodon could be more efficient. I think there must be problems in their implementation. I think it needs a core rewrite. I think of the current infrastructure of Mastodon as like old Atom editor. Remember it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor). It was super extensible and ran on Electron, but it was slow and somewhat unstable. Then VSCode come around with much of the same benefits but it was fast and stable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code Before VSCode rose to prominent, many people would claim that an Electron-based editor would never work and point to the problems Atom had. But the issue was more specific to Atom and not just inherent in the general idea. We need the VSCode version of Mastodon so it can discard the inefficiencies that it currently has and scale to the opportunity.
  • Invictus0 4y ago
    If the blogpost were talking about a forest, they would be saying that the soil isn't fertile enough for proper forest growth, and you would be talking about rewriting the tree's DNA.
    • bhouston 4y ago
      Maybe but the first party mastodon iOS client pails in comparison to the more professional offerings. I suspect the mastodon server would similarly pop in comparison to a more professional rewrite. Remember they switched out the core engine of mongo as well (wild tiger) and then it became a lot less of a joke.
      • Invictus0 4y ago
        You're not getting it. Would rewriting MySpace or Google+ have made those things succeed? No, because speed was not the main issue.
        • bhouston 4y ago
          I was mostly responding to the main topic in the original post article. It was mostly about the cost of servers for Mastodon. I believe that Mastodon can be rewrite to be much more efficient. I am on Mastodon and get a lot of engagement these days.
• JustSomeNobody 4y ago
  That's a silly take. It all comes from the perspective that Mastodon has to be the next big thing. This is BS. It can stay small and serve those who choose to use it.
• fabiofzero 4y ago
  VCs hate Mastodon (actually the federation) because they can't control it. Hence this post. Nothing to see here.
• Lolaccount 4y ago
  My n=1 experience has been far better using Mastodon than twitter. I used to check the Twitter Explore page without logging in, just see what was going down. But now that they've 'bodged' that up too, they've released me from any reason to go back. Thank you, Elon. It's a relief to encounter generally "real" and/or "interesting" people (who are the kind of people to persist on Mastodon) instead of political mudslingers, blue check twitter maximalists, Elon d riders, etc. Just a better experience all around. Mastodon feels a bit like the old bulletin boards used to feel like - "just over there dealing with its own niche in a calm and kind of fun way ... not the centre of the universe or trying to be this or that...". And I'm thankful for it.
• mg 4y ago
  I don't know enough about ActivityPub to be sure, but it seems that the "push" format is the problem? If user U1 on server C1 subscribes to user U2 on server C2, does that mean when U2 posts, C2 sends the post to C1, independent of wether U1 is online or not? If C1 can only request the updates while U1 is online, then the Fediverse should scale just like RSS. I never heard anybody saying that RSS is doomed because of scaling issues.
  • rektide 4y ago
    The same net quantity of data would likely be sent so I'm not sure what the advantage would be. There's be some savings from users just never signing in & never pulling. But also, server c2 also has hundreds or thousands of other users too. If any of those subscribe to u1, that traffic would have been sent either way. So the hypothetical unread messages advantage of pull rapidly erodes at any kind of scale. I'm not sure what the gain might be. One nice thing about rss is that it's relatively cacheable. CDNs are well optimized. Honestly I think it's mostly just bad implementations, that figuring out what messages to pushing data out ought be fairly optimizable & not terrible to scale out effectively. But being efficient & smart about it does take some though.
  • mariusor 4y ago
    > the "push" format is the problem I mean it only worked for email since the dawn of the internet. :P But ActivityPub has no concept of "online" for actors, the activities that have an actor in their recipients list will end up in their inbox no matter what.
  • JustinGarrison 3y ago
    [OP] Active vs static/passive protocols is a big scaling, security, and maintenance problem. I wrote about it previously [1] and proposed adding a static option to ActivityPub and was flatly denied. [1] https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-instance/ https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-in...
• rvz 4y ago
  It appears that the official Mastodon app has crowned 'mastodon.social' as the default on the official Mastodon app. [0] So it has been admitted that asking the user to 'choose a server' was a disastrous thing to do for adoption which confuses the user from the start. Hence this 'default' it also means the centralization of mastodon.social will accelerate, federation never mattered in the first place and risking the same problem that happened with pawoo.net, mstdn.jp and and mastodon.cloud all acquired under one company. [0] So the bigger you get, the bigger you are as a takeover target. If the instance is too small, will risk getting DDoSed very easily and won't be able to handle an influx of new users and would have to close signups. If it is too big, it risks not being able to scale and needs to re-centralize with Cloudflare and the instance will receive lots of take over attempts from those with deep pockets. Eventually, the owners will cave in. Just like they did with a 'default' instance. Do not tell me that you will reject someone willing to take over an instance with lots of users for hundreds of millions of dollars. [0] https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677 https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677 [1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquires-pawoonet-one-of-the-largest-mastodon-instances-301707919.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquir...
• ivanmontillam 4y ago
  I agree with all author remarks in this post. Turns out that we already have the federated web. If we truly wanted to federate social media, we already have federated blogs. It has been on the decline a lot, but it's a choice for those who truly want it. I've also thought that if Twitter stopped existing, it'd leave a hole Mastodon can never fill. Maybe Bluesky can? but what I'd do instead is to invest far more in POSSE, and maybe add a micro-blogging feature on my website for these random threads I sometimes write (I'd be the only account on my website, though). From the start, I've also thought Mastodon is doomed, it gave me a "code-smell" the double @ usage (one for the username and another one for the server itself you belong to). It just never did make any sense to me (maybe I'm just criticizing the aesthetic aspects of it).
  • mariusor 4y ago
    > I've also thought that if Twitter stopped existing, it'd leave a hole Mastodon can never fill. Maybe Bluesky can? Why do you think that Bluesky will be able to do what Mastodon can't?
    • SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
      > Why do you think that Bluesky will be able to do what Mastodon can't? And, why would you think that Bluesky will be able to do what Twitter can't? i.e. remain both viable and not enshitified (1), in the face of the need to either turn a profit or be up for sale? AFAIK, Bluesky has the same kind of business model as twitter, therefor the same failure mode. Why would I sign up for that ride again? 1) https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
    • ivanmontillam 4y ago
      I mentioned Bluesky just as a competitor in terms of sharing the same market with a similarly-specified product, but other than "it's a microblogging site" I don't know what else it is. I'm not there, yet.
      • mariusor 4y ago
• masukomi 4y ago
  > All of those “features” come with with a heavy price—responsibility. Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale. Huh. I didn't it difficult to understand how to click the "Buy Now" button on masto.host I spent about 5 minutes a month "running" it which is to say, responding to the maybe 1 request by my users to block an account / server. I spend less by letting him do it, and i don't have to deal with securing it or scaling it.
• xwdv 4y ago
  For me the decision of having to choose a server always made Mastodon a non-starter for me. Just requires too much activation energy to even get started.
  • kornhole 4y ago
    It is about freedom and choice. If you don't want that or are unable, there are plenty of platforms that make the choices for you.
• rsynnott 4y ago
  > It’s only a matter of time until there will be a CVE found in the official Mastodon software which will leave a vast majority of instances vulnerable It's only a matter of, er, four years ago, in fact: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/59775/Joinmastodon-Mastodon.html?vendor_id=20653 https://www.cvedetails.com/product/59775/Joinmastodon-Mastod... Also, by this reasoning, Wordpress is doomed; at peak Wordpress averaged about one CVE _per week_. And yet Wordpress remains stubbornly ubiquitous...
• prmoustache 4y ago
  The biggest struggle to me for admins will be spam management.
• timmb 4y ago
  I feel the real problem with Mastodon is that there's no way to reclaim an identity if a server goes down. The idea of a fediverse is to be robust against instances collapsing, but it seems the only way to move server is to leave a pointer on the old server. Instead, you could put a public key on your profile and keep a local backup of your data and private key. Then if your instance dies or you get booted out (there will always be tyrants and schizms) you can still set up shop somewhere else and ping your old followers with a signed message. Right now it's like a city with a lot of bars which is great except you can't leave and go to a different one with the same face.
  • basscomm 4y ago
    > I feel the real problem with Mastodon is that there's no way to reclaim an identity if a server goes down. The idea of a fediverse is to be robust against instances collapsing, but it seems the only way to move server is to leave a pointer on the old server. Email has the same problem, but is it really a problem?
    • timmb 3y ago
      I guess with email you can at least use your own domain with a third party provider because it has a DNS record, which gives you somewhere between self-hosting and a federated community. Of course, if you lose your domain you're out of luck.
  • throwaway689236 4y ago
    Nostr solves this problem, your identity is defined by a private+public key pair, you own your account and history instead of the node admin.
  • funOtter 4y ago
    I think that you're describing Nostr.
  • JustinGarrison 3y ago
    [OP] Bluesky/AT protocol solves this by making identity a DNS domain verified with TXT record. That's also 1. unsquatable 2. universal across apps My Bluesky name is my site justingarrison.com and it can be that on any other sites that use the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub
• senko 4y ago
  I don't know. I'm happy paying $12/yr ($1/mo) for an account. If operation costs are half that, a few thousand users can make a nice side gig hosting this. Why does everything need to scale exponentially or it is doomed? Federation avoids the "winner take all" trap. I don't know if Mastodon is going to grow or if something else (Bluesky?) will replace it, or if we'll just all stay on Twitter. But it doesn't seem to me like it's doomed.
• drcongo 4y ago
  This post should have (2017) in the title. Not because that's when it was written, but because that's when all the articles it's a rehash of were written.
• redder23 4y ago
  Let Mastodon die and let Nostr take over. Nostr to me sounds superior in pretty much every way.
  • mariusor 4y ago
    Too bad you don't let us know how exactly.
  • KomoD 4y ago
    Please explain how it's superior? When I looked at it months ago someone was hardcore spamming porn images with fresh identities each time in the global feed, and all client implementations were terrible.
• agentultra 4y ago
  I’ve been around since before the Internet was available to most folks. Seen it grow, lived through Eternal September, watched all the technology revolutions come and go. It’s fun reading predictions like this some times. In the late aughts FB was only getting started. xkcd drew a map of the Internet at the time where FB became a huge land mass and all of the other popular sites at the time were beginning to dwindle as little islands and archipelagos. Funny how from then until 2016 or so that FB continued to dominate and take over. Google, Twitter, etc joined the fray too and the idea of centralized social networks taking over everything became the new normal. Businesses replaced their websites with Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. Developers stopped hosting their vanity sites and wrote Medium articles instead. But before all of that got going, before VC money and HN and the current crop of IPOs took hold, there was a period in the early aughts when much of the foundations of what we know the Internet today was built… by hobbyists, hackers, and the OSS community. Some of us worked at company’s that funded our efforts, some of us built things to satisfy our own needs and communities. But many predicted it would all go away under the pressures of capital and an influx of non-technical, casual users. In a sense it did. But I think Mastodon and ActivityPub’s continued existence and thriving communities wouldn’t have been predicted by someone in 2016-2017. Doomed? We’ll see.
• louison11 4y ago
  A technologically interesting product and a relevant commercial product are two vastly different things. Problem with these projects is they are driven by technical curiosity instead of being run like businesses. The sweet spot is finding ways in which decentralization fits use cases that centralization cannot provide, all while being vastly superior to everything else. That hasn’t been the case so far for social media.
• no_wizard 4y ago
  My biggest problem with Mastodon is I'm not really getting good casual interactions. I thought it would be more "open" and free flowing conversation, but its largely been this loud echo chamber of opinions and organic discussion of different things hasn't really materialized the way I hoped (this is, in fact, something I do get out of current Twitter, believe it or not) I have tried interacting with different instances and what not, going more niche community hasn't materialized very well, traction is really low
• dragontamer 4y ago
  So the approximate fair market cost is roughly 10 cents per month? 5 cents for server costs, double that for a decent profit margin? So maybe charge $2/year for the service or something?
• kernal 4y ago
  I can't help but draw parallels to Mastodon and the Year of Linux on the desktop. There was no way Mastodon was ever going to succeed due to the network effects.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  It's funny watching all this because we had all this in the 90's and early 2k's and went away from it for a reason. Anyone remember Hotline or Caracho? These were client/server/tracker software for federated communities. If you wanted to host a server which had chat, messaging, forum, files, etc you'd download the server software and run on your computer using something like DYNDNS to keep your host address static. You'd register with a tracker so that others could find you. Trackers could ban servers they didn't like by not listing them. People running client software would connect to a tracker to get a list of servers and connect to them if allowed. The server operator could have a free for all or create privileged accounts. It was great. But it can't scale and it's too complex for most people. People left these types of networks for Facebook, Twitter, etc. Going back to this, or a variation of it, is simply regressive. It's the wrong direction.
• nologic01 4y ago
  Mastodon (both the software and the communities around it) is the first successful mammal in a world of dinosaurs. The challenges highlighted in the post feel generally true but the conclusion of it being doomed doesnt follow. What you have in the broader fediverse and its protocols is a alternative set of blueprints for building online interaction spaces. All transparent, open source and not predicated on obscene business models (gulping the planet's entirety of private data) in order to survive. Dinosaurs will continue roaming the digital Pangaea for a while but it is their gene pool that is doomed. They actually face all the same issues in essence, but are considerably less nimble in coming up with viable adaptations. Will people launching mastodon instances in vast numbers in five years? Will it be an elixir bonfire? Maybe a pythonic AI fediverse? I don't know what will evolve. But that meteor on the sky is harbinger of major changes coming up.
  • midoridensha 3y ago
    >Mastodon (both the software and the communities around it) is the first successful mammal in a world of dinosaurs. They should have named it "Rodent" instead. >Dinosaurs will continue roaming the digital Pangaea for a while but it is their gene pool that is doomed. Is it? In the real world, the thing that doomed the dinosaurs was the Chuxhulub asteroid impact, and the resulting climate disaster. Is there going to be some kind of massive apocalypse on the internet that destroys Twitter/FB/etc. and clears the way for the new mammals?
• skee8383 4y ago
  "The reality is people don’t want to pick their favorite community, running an instance is expensive and complicated, and owning your data isn’t a product feature." This is the problem that affects all federated/decentralized projects. Same thing with Urbit. No one wants to keep their computer running 24/7 to support a network. and no one wants to bare the financial burden of paying for a server to host a community.
• brucethemoose2 4y ago
  Yall are looking at this the wrong way. Mastadon is a bad Twitter replacement. But with a few tweaks, it is a good Discord and Telegram replacement. The inevitable Discord/Telegram monetization squeeze is going to be a huge event for Mastadon.
  • artificial 4y ago
    How much do you pay for Mastadon? How much does it cost to host?
    • cdelsolar 4y ago
      [flagged]
    • brucethemoose2 4y ago
      For a big former Discord group? Probably a lot. But many Discord (and some Telegram) admins already self host auxiliary stuff and solicit community donations for funding. TBH they would probably like running their own instance as a hobby.
• sanity31415 4y ago
  What we need is a common platform, an operating system for building interoperable and scalable decentralized services. This is exactly what we're building with https://docs.freenet.org/ https://docs.freenet.org/.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  I’m checking in regularly to see if it’s Twitter yet (the only reason I’d use it) and so far it’s not. It’s slowly getting closer but still a long way off the time when you can just use it as a timeline of tweets from 100 known people like I use Twitter. I realize becoming Twitter is a non-goal, but the actual goals are also uninteresting to most I think.
  • fuzzehchat 3y ago
    If you wont use it until it's twitter, just use twitter. The fediverse doesn't want to be twitter. Very few care if most people don't want to use it because they've been using it quite happily for years before twitter imploded. blusky looking at payment for likes is a joke too.
• Tepix 4y ago
  "You can, of course, run your own server. Just like you can run your own email server. And you will be blocked from the broader public discorse just the same. There will be no way for large instances to trust and allow every individual instance. The moderation work will be too much and they’ll end up trusting only large, established instances." I don't think this is happening. Instances are only banned after they attract negative attention, not whitelisted, which would be antithetical to the idea of federation.
• fuzzehchat 4y ago
  Running an instance isn't expensive. Running an instance with 10,000 users might be, but you don't have to have lots of users. I run an instance and I can and do easily communicate with lots of other people on other instances without much effort at all. I'd say that I've managed to find more people, with less effort who share some of the same interests as me and honestly I don't know which instance they are on because it didn't matter. Using hashtags to find content that you like, following a handfull of people and suddenly your feed comes alive. Perhaps we should stop teating users like morons. Sure it's different but people learn.
• lemiffe 4y ago
  I had the same issue described in the article... how do you choose a community? It was the first question I had when looking into Mastodon, and a few minutes in I closed the tabs. I don't want to choose a community, I want a single place/domain I rely on, I don't care if the backend is decentralised, I want the entry as a new user to be as low as possible, I need to understand the product in a few sentences. They lost me as a potential user, I wonder how many more they lost. That entry barrier (just as with UX / registration forms) has to be as low as possible.
  • xaduha 4y ago
    If you think in these terms you're better off staying on Twitter and that's completely fine.
    • websitejanitor 4y ago
      Ordinary people will sign up for Bluesky instead of Mastodon. Removing friction is absolutely essential to growing a user base. Not everyone finds value in signaling how technical they are by overcoming/dealing with FOSS jank
  • ahelwer 4y ago
    If choosing one of several instances requires too high of activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem. You've circumscribed your own abilities to such an extent that it limits you to centralized for-profit social networks. > They lost me as a potential user Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy. You're approaching mastodon with a customer mentality. This isn't a sale being made! Nobody is losing out on profiting off your time & attention! This is you choosing whether you want to keep feeding from the intentionally-insanity-causing trough of social networks that monetize attention.
    • romwell 4y ago
      >If choosing one of several instances requires too high of activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem. No it's not. The reasons why were outlined in the article, but I'll re-iterate them: 1. Choosing a community has long-lasting consequences for the user: -a: Losing an account due to server being unstable or unable to keep up with growth is a risk; -b: Choice of community determines the user's ability to communicate with other users, due to the community whitelist/blacklist nature of moderation. Join a "wrong" community, good luck being seen by anyone; 2. Choice of a server is supposed to reflect the identity of the user, and they will be treated differently on the entire network depending on which community they join -a: The moderators of the instance you join can kick you off the entire network for violating the rules of that community, even if your activity is elsewhere; -b: In addition to other users not being able to interact with you at all if your instance is blacklisted by the admins of another instance, you will be judged by others depending on which instance you join - so you need to know what reputation the users of a community have on the network before joining the network -c: Instance admins have complete control over your account, including the ability to read your messages and kick you off the network because of things you say in your communications, so the user needs to know the reputation of the admins on the network before they join it >> They lost me as a potential user >Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy. Oh right, why does a social network need users for, after all? Are you kidding me? It is a tragedy for a social network if nobody uses it. Social network users aren't just customers - they are also the product, part of the value proposition. Both in their identities and the content they create. Mastodon has far less to offer by design, so it's a no-go for me. You can say "oh what a tragedy", but I'm easily in the top 1% of users on reddit with nonzero karma by either post/comment karma/number of comments/amount of text typed; so people like me are what keeps a platform alive. Because we give others a reason to log in. And since choosing an instance effectively means choosing an audience - yes, it is a hurdle for content creators in particular, and your dismissive attitude is an indicator that it's not an issue that is understood well by fans of the platform. Which is why it's doomed.
• wnevets 4y ago
  From what I can tell developers and the infosec community moved to mastodon, that's good enough for me. I don't have to everyone on the planet using the same social media service for me to use it.
• rg111 4y ago
  > Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn diagrams of lots of communities and interests. Selecting a username can be difficult, deciding which community you want as part of your identity—even if you can change it—is too much. The act of choosing a server has kept more than a few people away from Mastodon. I don't want people to be Venn diagrams. I want communities to be a Venn diagram. Like subreddits, or FB Groups, or Discord servers. I have always been a person with many interests. And Mastodon doesn't cut it for me. The way I find new reddit subs in comments or come to know about new FB groups from friends- is missing in Mastodon. Why should I must choose among Open Source, Math and Machine Learning? I like all of them. I should be able to see posts from all communities on a single feed. It is also not as Twitter or Instagram. Where everything is people centric but you get suggestions and shares from different interest groups.
  • fuzzehchat 3y ago
    The way you find stuff on the fediverse is searching for hashtags. I have wildly differing interests and it's perfectly fine for me. I have load of topics and a feed that updates at a reasonable rate. following people who share your interests exposes you to other conversations with with other people.
• system16 4y ago
  > The reality is people don’t want to pick their favorite community, > Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn diagrams of lots of communities and interests. Selecting a username can be difficult, deciding which community you want as part of your identity—even if you can change it—is too much. The act of choosing a server has kept more than a few people away from Mastodon. This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit. I like football and tech and travel, but I don't see why I would want to link my identity directly to one of these interests. And yes, I understand I can still communicate with other instances or can change my instance if needed, but the fact this even needs to be qualified is friction, especially for new non-technical users.
  • madeofpalk 4y ago
    Mastodon project seems to be very aware of it this. I believe gargron said recently in an interview they're changing the mobile app to default to mastodon.social, and putting signing up for other instances behind another "Advanced" screen or something. https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-interview-elon-musk-twitter https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-inter... > mastodon.social isn’t actually the default in our app. It’s just one of the top ones that shows up. However, I think that possibly going forward, we might rework the onboarding user experience into presenting a default option as well as an advanced option, where all that stuff with choosing a server would basically be hidden away from the people who get intimidated by choice.
  • romwell 4y ago
    >This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit. I said this last time Mastodon was discussed here, and was downvoted to hell by fans of the platform. The best part is a particular subreddit being able to ban you from the entire platform because they don't like what you do in another subreddit. Thanks, but no thanks.
• iepathos 4y ago
  Vaguely reminds me of late 90's early 00's articles saying linux was doomed lol. The reasons are all similar anti-open source reasons. General disregard for personal responsibility and ownership along with preference of the masses towards ease of use.
  • JustinGarrison 3y ago
    [OP] on the flip side, did you know 2022 was the year of Linux on the desktop! https://justingarrison.com/blog/year-of-linux-desktop/ https://justingarrison.com/blog/year-of-linux-desktop/
• albertkinng 4y ago
  [flagged]
• solarkraft 4y ago
  Just like E-Mail, right? Really: The federation model is the same. It faces the same fundamental constraints (arguably exacerbated by some technical ones). They've been solved for E-Mail. I believe they're solvable for ActivityPub by going through similar steps. We can argue about the centralization of E-Mail all we want: There are still multiple companies providing the service and it's possible to start your own. Yes, companies - I think that while loose and and more or less charitable communities definitely have a future, real stability and trust will come from entities large enough to be too big to easily fall over (and most naturally those are companies with paying users). I've seen so many small instances go away, leaving their users almost completely helpless and effectively locked out of the network. Keep in mind that your instance is your identity provider (I think there have been efforts to change this, but I'm not seeing any ways to migrate from an instance that is already gone).
  • pizzalife 4y ago
    The analogy would be closer to Usenet than email.
  • kornhole 4y ago
    Activity pub federation is much easier than email. Most of the ISP's block email ports on our home connections which requires us to setup mail relays just for the email verification of account setups. Then you have to do all kinds of work to make your email seem valid and not blocked by all the gatekeepers. Activity pub is just running over HTTPS, and we can control how we federate and block unwanted content with the great tools built into most implementations.
  • romwell 3y ago
    >Just like E-Mail, right? Are you generally afraid of losing your email account for sending a rude message to someone? >It faces the same fundamental constraints (arguably exacerbated by some technical ones) No, because the technical constraints are very different. For one, with email, by default, you can keep the entire data at all times (remember email clients?). Your account being nuked isn't a big loss if you use the default mail app that came with your OS - your messages and contacts are still there, just email them all with a "hey, here's my new email". >Keep in mind that your instance is your identity provider Well that's the entire problem, right there.
• albertkinng 4y ago
  [flagged]
• johnklos 4y ago
  All of those “features” come with with a heavy price—responsibility. Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale. It also can be quite expensive if it grows to any meaningful amount of use. I think it's important to note, which I think the article fails to do, that this isn't a problem with other Fediverse software, but something unique to Mastodon: 1) Ruby on Rails is, well, bad. It was in the past, but I hoped things had changed. I tried running Mastodon, and in the two weeks I was playing with it late last year there were two dependency updates which broke Mastodon, until Mastodon was updated. It's untenable, and it certainly adds to the idea that running your own is "increadibly time consuming", if you have to worry about breaking things any time any dependency gets updated. 2) The failure of Ruby on Rails leads to insecurity. Most people don't update because of #1 and just let things run. This is all fine and dandy until there are real security issues, at which time people sometimes panic, update and break things, or there's a compromise. 3) Mastodon (and Ruby on Rails) isn't performant. A decent modern server, particularly one that could be bought for $5,000, should easily be able to handle 30,000 users, if one were to extrapolate from some of the articles written about Fediverse hosting... But the articles showing very good performance aren't about Mastodon. Some specifically talk about migrating to other software because of Mastodon performance. So is it time consuming? Yes, because it's slow, breaks easily and doesn't scale well. I think it's demonstrably true that other software (Pleroma, for example, or Akkoma for those of us who aren't fans of the Pleroma admins) is faster (and therefore scales much better), isn't remotely as fragile (and therefore can be kept up to date and secured with ease), and less time consuming (most updates take literally a minute or two). Perhaps the author should consider the idea that the failure of Mastodon is not the same thing as the failure of the Fediverse precisely because other options exist.
  • JustinGarrison 3y ago
    [OP] Did I say the fediverse would fail in the article? I tried to not imply that in any way. But Mastodon is the largest fediverse network and I don't see it scaling or accommodating the general public.
    • johnklos 3y ago
• jwmoz 4y ago
  A solution for developers built by developers. Should have thought of the end user first.
• booleandilemma 4y ago
  Beyond scaling concerns is the legal responsibility. If you host an instance for other people you should be prepared to invest time documenting and training moderators... The idea that there are laws that surround this stuff...laws that lock out enthusiastic people from sharing their own Mastodon servers with the world, is so sad to me. It's antithetical to the hacker spirit and it will stifle any grassroots effort. The web has gotten way too serious.
• egypturnash 4y ago
  shrug FidoNet was doomed, too, in the long run. Newsfroups were doomed, in the long run. AOL was doomed, too. Friendster. Livejournal. The Blogosphere. Flickr. Xanga. Diaryland. Myspace. Twitter. Facebook. Tiktok. Instagram. Youtube. Discord. IRC. Slack. That thing you're working on that involves a blockchain. Nostr. Bluesky. I give you this litany of doomed social networks. Some have fallen long ago. Some are still hanging on. Some are just beginning to fall. Mastodon, right now, is rising. In ten years will we still be using it? In ten years will we remember it fondly as a transitional stage to whatever future ActivityPub clients and hosts we use to connect with our friends, build communities, and share the work of filtering out people who want to use us purely as a source of profit, or who are actively opposed to our continuing existence? In ten years will we all once more be in one monolithic corporate-owned profit-seeking social network, remembering wistfully when it looked like we might be breaking free of those chains for a while? Even so, whatever we are using in that future: it, too, is doomed. Newspapers were doomed. Magazines were doomed. Social media is doomed. Mastodon is hiring right now. Do you think it needs to be lighter on resources, easier to run, easier to personalize? I run one and I certainly think so. Do you have the skills to make it those things? Send them a resume. Tell them that this is what you want to do. Do you have the money to not worry about paying the bills for a few years after, say, working at Disney's feature division, then helping them build their streaming service, then moving over to Amazon for a while? Then take a working vacation: grab the source, start making proposals, start offering major patches. Mastodon is doomed. Will you stand by and comment on its demise? Will you do something to keep it running? Will you try to hasten that doom for the good of the Fediverse by building an alternative server with a well-tested "import everything from an existing Mastodon in one click" button? I dunno, I'm not you.
  • cornhole34 4y ago
    [flagged]
• kornhole 4y ago
  So many people are saying that picking an instance is just too difficult. Let's just create a random picker like a Roulette wheel of all open instances for those people. Moving instances later is easy.
• huslage 4y ago
  Whataboutism is a powerful drug.
• kornhole 4y ago
  Running your own instance is not difficult. I recommend installing Yunohost.org on a $5/month VPS or some hardware you have laying around such as a single board computer. Installing apps from the Yunohost catalog is like installing from an app store. You can try different apps like Akkoma, Mastodon, Calckey, and others until you find the one you like. Then Yunohost makes maintenance and upgrade easy thank to the community of people maintaining the scripts that do everything behind the scenes.
• jrm4 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm hoping he's wrong, but this good analysis. Count me in as among those who actively does want Mastodon to be the new Twitter. Its becoming increasingly clear to me that a hugely scaled microblogging platform is important (if not essential) to world discourse and democracy, and that a federated platform is probably the long term best, if not easiest, way to do it. Honestly, the bit that kind of baffles me is the extent to which big companies don't seem to realize that this solves potential "Eli Lilly" problems. This shouldn't be too hard to explain either. "Hey, you know how you can own your email and your website? You can do that too with something like twitter if everyone starts using Mastodon. You should throw some money at a server to do that."
• einpoklum 4y ago
  > hachyderm.io had trouble scaling ... with 30,000 users and over $5000 worth of equipment... They were able to migrate ... to Digital Ocean ... at a cost ... [of] more than $1000/mo. 1 TB of data fits several time in a typical consumer HDD. Is it really not enough to have $5,000 USD of hardware to run a 30K-user Mastodon instance?
• superkuh 4y ago
  There's no way to read a mastadon post without executing javascript. There's not even a proxy like "nitter" is for twitter to view posts as HTML. The "best" way is to read the entire feed of a user by requesting it as json and parsing that with your eyes. It's a terrible user experience. I mostly just ignore mastadon servers post version 3.
  • foul 3y ago
    Why don't you host an instance of snac and read posts from there? https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2 https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2
    • superkuh 3y ago
      While that c code is at least unchanging on my disk and reviewable, it's still a lot to ask that I compile and run special software to read a particular type of webpage. Mastadon's design is terrible in the sense that it perfectly captures how bad twitter was/is without any of the community mitigations of the disaster in accesibility. I don't want to run an activitypub server. I just want text and image websites to actually have text and images. This is not too much to ask for a community protocol. Before mastadon v3 it was an option (and the default option).
• distantsounds 4y ago
  He's not wrong. I'd love to join the fediverse but I want to do so on my own terms with my own server, and I don't want to set up an entire mastodon instance just to do that. Making activitypub synonymous with mastodon is dangerous and i am sure is not what the intention is.
• gnramires 4y ago
  I think there's a point in particular that's not true: > If the instance you’re on is compromised you will lose your identity because private keys are stored as part of the instance. No private keys, no identity, no portability. I don't think it's quite so bad, although of course a server vulnerability is bad: you can have an email account as a backup. That's the way many services have kept secure: you can invalidate the old password after a breach and email users a new one. In the worst case, you could try to prove to moderators you're really the account owner. However, the most important point is that it's just an account: you can just create a new one, and be mostly fine (after letting people know you've moved). In the case of the breach mentioned before, a notice could be left on inactive post-breach accounts. There's not really too much data you'd care about that isn't public already, and you can do regular backups in case there is (private messages, I guess?). It might be nice to add some auto backup functionality to some cloud service I guess.
  • JustinGarrison 3y ago
    [OP] the reason I pointed that out is because public figures (reporters, celebs) can't risk that. If a server is hacked and their private key is stolen you could post anything you want as them. Of course twitter has had the same problems in the past but twitter was able to help them (usually) reclaim the account. With ActivityPub if I stole your private key there's nothing you could do to stop me until the server rotates keys. AFAIK there's no way to scrub the fediverse of tweets I sent signed with your hacked private key.
• mnd999 4y ago
  I used to run my own server. Then I checked out #nsfw to see how much porn was getting federated into my google cloud storage bucket. I don’t want to have a Google account limiting argument with Google about this so it seemed safer to move to somebody else’s server.
• nrvn 4y ago
  > Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale. Tell this to phpbb/vbulletin/whatever forum admins. A huge chunk of those forums have been up and alive for 20 years and more. Yes, they are probably not super secure, do not support horizontal autoscaling and are not replicated across multiple datacenters. But who cares if they work and give the sense of community?.. Another example would be jabber/xmpp servers. Btw, google chat and facebook messenger were xmpp-based meaning you could chat with anyone outside of then-not-so-walled gardens. But this is a completely different story.
  • iudqnolq 4y ago
    Isn't the argument that those forums are much better designed than Mastodon. From the other recent HN article on mastodon, where the author writes their own server, the protocol seems horribly innefficient.
• lakomen 4y ago
  Hachyderm.io is operated by an Ukrainian Faschist who censors any truthful comments and bans people because of that on 1st occurrence. I ran my own instance and deleted it after 3 months. No one wants to accept you as a relay. The only one who did accept was Beckmeyer, good guy. But it had week long outages. Searching Mastodon posts is impossible. There's a very strong cancel culture on Mastodon instances. The main players control who can and can speak freely. It's all even more fucked up than Facebook and Twitter. Add to that PITA upgrade procedures, and a 500 char limit per post, which includes hashtags. Absolutely ridiculous how this pos software made it so far.
  • pornel 4y ago
    Their policies seem good. It looks like you've broken their rules, got banned, and you're continuing to be a dick about it. https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/moderation/covenant/ https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/moderation/covenant/ Also please note that fascism is a specific ideology, not merely a description for everyone who doesn't want you in their community.
• mcv 4y ago
  I don't know about Mastodon, but Friendica has been a smashing success from my perspective. My feed is full of interesting people, many of whom are on Mastodon. It doesn't have to be for everybody; it's pretty good the way it is. That said, I think a Fediverse account should be standard with an ISP account just like email. Pay your ISP to maintain the server just like they maintain everything else you already you already use. And if you use your account for threats and harassment, your ISP knows who you are.
• withinrafael 4y ago
  > If mastodon is to be the poster child of the fediverse it needs to drastically simplify the requirements to run and maintain an instance. Completely agree. I tried to self-host Cloudflare's Wildebeest as part of the "own your own identity and content" dream and it was a complete disaster. It's an incomplete amalgamation of alpha-quality and production Cloudflare services and code with no real roadmap. It doesn't install properly out of the box using their own documentation and most clients will try to use some Mastodon/ActivityPub API that isn't implemented and fail. So unless you're looking to seriously hack on its codebase, I'd recommend staying away for a few years.
• atak1 4y ago
  I also never really got into Mastodon. My belief is that you still need to build a 10x better product, and Mastodon hasn't achieved that. Now, the upside for Mastodon is - they have a great platform that a number of people have flocked to bc of the Twitter backlash. Can they create sustainable value for the communities (or people within those communities)? What do people who run these communities want (beyond decentralization)? Personally, I think the crux is reputation-building. You need to give a few Mastodon users a sense of pride in engaging everyday with their community. From the handful of servers I'm on, I don't see this clearly happening yet. But hope they can get there!
• dickhardt 4y ago
  The OP conflates the fediverse with Mastodon, and my understanding of his key point is that it is doomed because Mastodon is complicated to run. As the operator of https://press.coop https://press.coop, I agree. Mastodon is 10 yr old web tech (Ruby on Rails with Postgres) that does not take advantage of modern cloud architectures. (The streaming service is written in nodejs and is efficient and just works) But software continues to evolve. There are numerous other software projects on the fediverse, Cloudflare's Wildebeest being an example of a more efficient, and easier to manage implementation. Crowdfunding has become a common means for instances to be funded. It is still early days for the fediverse, and the pace of innovation continues to accelerate. Remember that Twitter was twttr when it launched, and was an SMS based app. Flickr was a Flash app.
• dgellow 4y ago
  I don’t want to hijack a mastodon thread for an alternative, but because it is invite-only and still very new if people here want to try out Bluesky, send me an email at: sam at elborai me. I just got a whole bunch of invite codes and I’m happy sharing them with fellow HNers. It’s late in my time zone, so don’t expect a response before 8-10h, but I read all my emails in the morning.
• neallindsay 4y ago
  I clicked through expecting to see a blog post from six years ago, but according to the timestamp this post is only a couple of days old.
• TrevorFSmith 4y ago
  A useless generalization like "people don't want this" is a great example of why there's room in the world for a federated network of small instances. Humanity is not the Borg. The folks who obviously do want something different than a centralized network run for profit can go on happily using federations while people who want a new Twitter with a new board of directors calling the shots can go use one of those. It's ok for both to exist and to serve different purposes. Really.
• vitorgrs 4y ago
  I am a mod on an instance there. Liked at the beginning of the trend, but it has some real problems, so many little irks that makes the real replacement for Twitter horrible. 1. Proper search. I want to search everything that is on the fediverse. Or at least for content that is federated.... Obviously not possible, but this is a big issue already. 2. You can't see followers outside of your instance! Really, try to see who is your friend following/followed and it will show just your instance folks. 3. Do people realize each instance will show different likes/share and comments, as each one is federated with different instances? This is totally nutz in practice. 4. You open a profile and can't see the posts.... because no one from the instance followed that person before and no relay with it... Again, nutz! And in practice... The problem lies on the lack of quotes, and lack of important companies/news sites/person. I use Twitter to follow some news, see journalists' posts, and that's just impossible with Mastodon.
  • JustinGarrison 3y ago
    Bluesky and AT protocol fix almost all of those issues.
• gbraad 4y ago
  Mastodon isn't the only solution to run a server. He mentions that a single binary, smaller sized server is necessary. I would say, either that or a PHP based one. It is not difficult to run Friendica on something like dreamhost. It might not be as instant with delivery, but more than enough for an individual or a small group.
• EricHolden12 4y ago
  i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again. Mastodon has the same problem Diaspora did. Their name/branding is terrible and doesn’t resonate with non techy people. Nerds who make cool tech shouldn’t be in charge of naming it.
• pipeline_peak 4y ago
  tldr: All the eager people who went “hey we can do what big tech is doing too” are starting to realize it was never JUST about the tech. There’s financial resources and man power.
• protocolture 4y ago
  >1 billion posts per month >Niche Ok
• MR4D 3y ago
  Articles like this seem to fall just short of the goal line. For instance, this line: > Like Wordpress, the best way to use Mastodon is to pay a company to run it for you. Why didn't the author just go one more step to realize that most people don't run their own Wordpress instance, and Wordpress is thriving? I use Wordpress daily, and my company uses it - but it's hosted, not a self-run thing. The author is most likely right in that most people either will stop running their own instance, and out source it. But this is a time-honored pattern in IT. Many of us used to run our own email, web servers, Wordpress, etc. But for most of us, we've replaced that with services to do the same. There is no reason that there can't be a successful mastodon ecology just like there is for Wordpress. It makes sense that there would be many mastodon.example.com sites run by all sorts of folks, but hosted by different providers. Why can't articles like this see that?
  • JustinGarrison 3y ago
    [OP] very good point and Wordpress has a ton of adoption. I used to run my own until it got hacked multiple times over a years and I got tired of fixing or restoring it. Once tumblr has ActivityPub integration it'll have the largest node in the network. Is it still Mastodon? Isn't that just tumblr and the AP integration is an alternative RSS/Atom? Then Mastodon becomes Google Reader with comments and stars?
    • MR4D 3y ago
      >Isn't that just tumblr... In my eyes, if a bunch of different platforms have a reasonable degree of interoperability, and Mastodon is connected into that datastream, then Mastodon has won (and not doomed). Because in the end, the federation allows people to take their toys and go home if they so choose, and the risk of being censured or "de-platformed" essentially goes away. I think about email a lot in these conversations, and I remember when we used to have to set up sendmail and all sorts of other crap to have email. Now, sendmail has basically gone away, but we use email more than ever, and billions of people are still connected. Sendmail was that original structure that that broke apart the proprietary & enclosed email systems like CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc. To me, there are still issues with the email ecosystem today, but I don't lament sendmail's loss of market share, and I don't think of it as "doomed" but rather a huge success that spawned a massive industry. I think of AltaVista as doomed, because Google replaced it, and there was no shared or interoperable search ecosystem. Does that make sense? Hard for me to put into writing without rambling. ---- EDIT: meant to add that I liked your article, and I could tell you put a ton of work into it.
• JustinGarrison 3y ago
  [OP] Can someone explain to me why when I submit my articles to HN [1] they are mostly ignored but when other people submit them they go to front page? Why is there no automatic post merging? It’s really hard to keep track of replies and engage when I’m looking at the original submission edit: I’m also not sure why this submission has a question mark. This article wasn’t intended to be a question [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701341
• b3nji 3y ago
  Mastodon Isn't trying to be the next Twitter, it doesn't need to scale. Some of the very best communities are just 10,000 people. We can connect with each other, and see others instances. The author is to totally missing the point. If the headline has anytbing to do with it