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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

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
    - FalconSensei 4y ago
      Just my experience, but I think it might also be the type of users/instances. Haven't had much trouble now (perhaps my current instance blocks pleroma), but a few years ago I dropped Mastodon because I was getting the same amount of attrition than on Twitter. And every time, is was a Pleroma user. I even voted on a ticket to create 'local-only' posts, because I didn't wanna handle Pleroma users...
      - kkklppubgdzs 4y ago
        A lot of Pleroma users have different politics than Mastodon users because of the history of infighting between the developers, but this doesn't change the fact that people making stereotypes about the views of users based on the software their instance uses 1) hurts single user instances of Pleroma which are much easier to run than Mastodon and 2) makes the whole ActivityPub network more toxic and cliquish If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique That said I don't know why anyone would assume that the Fediverse would be better moderated than Twitter when the architecture of the protocol makes regulating "attrition" harder, not easier.
        FalconSensei 4y ago
        > If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique At that time, it was just the fact that I was a windows user. And once because I posted a pic of me watching anime on my TV, and someone asked how I got screenshots for posting them on mastodon/blog later. User was definitely not pleased that I mentioned I got from /r/anime discussion thread for each episode But yeah, I'm definitely part of a clique of normies that just wanna use a social network to chat with people
      - Zak 4y ago
        If anything is going to strangle the usability of federated social networking, it's petty or indiscriminate server blocking. I just saw a popular tips account suggesting that everyone running a smaller server should block mastodon.social if it grew over 50% of the active userbase. Pleroma was the first ActivityPub server I tried running for myself. I picked it for technical reasons. I switched from it to Mastodon for UX reasons. I don't know anything about the politics of either lead developer, but I think both have crappy design decisions around how they display images by default. Of course, block anything you want on your single-user server, and any persistent sources of abusive behavior if you're running servers for other people.
- everybodyknows 4y ago
  From https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/ https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/ > Federation Issues > > Since every ActivityPub server implementation has a slightly different interpretation of the protocol, some servers don't quite federate properly with GoToSocial yet ... How's the specification/validation effort for ActivityPub progressing? https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    The only servers I currently have an issue with federating from my GtS instance are Honk instances and that's because (I'm reasonably sure) of a Honk weirdness. YMMV, obvs.
- BryantD 4y ago
  Anyone have any insight into the state of Takahe? Progress has slowed down a lot in the last two months.
  - BryantD 4y ago
    Answering my own question: https://aeracode.org/2023/04/29/refactor-treat/ https://aeracode.org/2023/04/29/refactor-treat/ “I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US; both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to build, exactly.”
  - manfre 4y ago
    I can't speak for Andrew, but my contributions to Takahe tapered off due to work killing my motivation to code after hours. It's also been feature complete enough for how I use it for many months. The biggest missing feature that others want is identity migration. I hacked in support to get my identity migrated to Takahe, but it's not something releasable to the general public.
RobotToaster 4y ago
>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. pleroma?
mariusor 4y ago
> Mastodon doesn't really have a good concept of unifying profiles in that way. I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. There's no need for multiple profiles if you can easily participate and be a part of both communities but at the same time not be a user of any of them. That's the benefit that Mastodon doesn't have, because their model of how federated communities should work predates ActivityPub's spec finalization. I think your use case would be satisfied if as a user you could "subscribe" to all activities generated on a server (or multiple), while your account would be on another one. ActivityPub makes this flow relatively simple, and one of the projects I'm working in the space has it as a design goal: small instances addressing themselves to communities with relatively low numbers (500-1k people), but at the same time the participation and receiving of updates from any other community in the network would be a click away.
scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago
Wondering same thing here. Isn’t there a possibility of a solution emerging in the coming years? If so why/why not?
fuzzehchat 4y ago
Pleroma is lightweight and fast.
madeofpalk 4y ago
> I really wish Mastodon wasn’t absorbing 95% of the ActivityPub hype Would be good to revisit this in 12 months. Medium and Tumblr seem to be keen to start to interop with ActivityPub. Supposedly even Meta is building on top of ActivityPub for a new service (which I can't seem to find a good source to link to, so who knows). I think ActivityPub is the new thing, so Mastodon has a bit of a first-ish mover advantage on it. Once all the big platforms get their proecjts out I think it'll get real interesting.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> A lot of recent arrivals want Twitter without the corporate ownership Which you can have on mastodon.social. Go sign up there if you want a non-corporate Twitter. Signups should be open now. Even if 90% of users are on a single instance, having a federated protocol matters as an insurance policy. If Oracle somehow assumes control of mastodon.social next year, everyone can move to some other instance and retain their connections. Furthermore, if someone else creates a better vision of social networking in the future, users will be able to switch one-by-one and continue communicating across platforms. There won't be a built-in imbalance due to the incumbent's network effect.
pkulak 4y ago
> 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! I fail to see the issue here. I'm not sure I care about seeing the most recent replies to something, from anyone, anywhere, vs the comments from the server I'm on, from the community I'm actively involved with. I like that my server doesn't bring in garbage from around the whole of the internet with perfect efficiency.
- Gareth321 4y ago
  While I agree, I believe we are in the minority.
armchairhacker 4y ago
Do those folks address the issue of ActivityPub transmitting massive amounts of data with 10000+ users? That's one of the main issues the big Mastodon communities have.
- mariusor 4y ago
  I would love to see some data about what you speak of, but a raw ActivityPub activity is maybe 1K in size. Propagating 1K sized payloads from 10K people (let's say that gives us about 10 per second) should not be that big of a deal in the age of streaming. I think unofficial censuses would put the total instance number at around 25000, so that's about the maximum number of outgoing messages a server would send. 25000(instances) * 10(messages/second) * 1000(bytes) = 256000000 bytes/s = 256MB/s of outgoing traffic Where Mastodon really gets it wrong is with the incessant caching of media that every instance does, and which is what maybe you are inadvertently thinking of.
  - armchairhacker 4y ago
    It may just be Mastodon which has the problem. Still, competitors should make sure to not re-create the problem. I don't remember the specific comment but something about how one of the top Mastodon servers was transmitting 100TB of data a month, or some other else unreasonably high number. This server only had ~10,000 users.
    - mariusor 4y ago
      If my math doesn't fail me that's almost an order of magnitude lower than 256MB/s. :D I'm suprised I got so close with my back of the napkin calculation. But what would you consider reasonable data usage for 10K users? Is it maybe possible that a technology that's trying to demonopolyse social networks is probably not optimised for high user counts on individual servers?
      - armchairhacker 4y ago
        I don't know how much data Hacker News transmits but I'm certain it's under 100TB/month. I do know HN has >6 million requests per day and only runs on 1 server (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379). I'm sure Mastodon requires more data-per-user than HN, and a server with 1M+ users will be expensive. But I don't think 10,000 users is that much, and a server with that many shouldn't cost $1000+/mo to operate.
aquova 4y ago
> Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with inefficient links between them rather than one whole I think this is the key element that Mastodon needs to focus on to make the overall experience smoother. I've been using Mastodon for a while now, and the experience actually gets smoother the more you use it. Eventually you find enough people to follow that you forget many of them might be on instances other than your own, but when you're new, you mainly just have the local feed to go on. My account is honestly on a server with a community that doesn't quite fit my personal niche, and if it was smoother to switch servers I probably would, but I also don't feel limited by that choice as much as I initially did.
genewitch 4y ago
I run a misskey server on a VM on hardware dedicated to our stuff - we control the hypervisor on the boxes, we "own the IP space", manage backups, etc. Misskey is a federated activitypub instance; and in my opinion it is better than mastodon at being a "twitter replacement." I checked the dashboard for my four user instance (myself and 3 others, total) and we're currently pub/sub to ~~5200~~ 5219 instances. I added a curated list of "journalists" across the federated activitypub realm, around 1300. So now i have basically the "news" part of twitter, 24/7, without all of the jokes, memes, and trash found on twitter. I also am on fosstodon, but I maintain that as a backup for another mastodon instance i have an account on, where both the maintainer and the public face of the instance have a "you get what you pay for" / "that's tough, suck it up" mentality toward maintenance and downtime (they're approaching less than 1 nine for the month of april). I am unsure of how many accounts fosstodon has, the local feed is pretty slow, so i'd guess between 1000-5000 users, the other mastodon instance is capped at 10,000 users, and a job removes everyone who has not logged in for a year, and signups are once a year (and maybe a thing of the past, to hear the "leader" talk). I really like misskey. I'd probably like something else more, as i can't admin misskey competently - most of the online help, advanced documentation, etc is in Japanese. For the record: currently 600GB attached; 130GB used, 24GB for / and 105GB for the misskey/files folder. It has 8GB of ram and 4 threads; it uses all 8 without OOM, and ~5% of the CPU. I don't really know the network throughput, but it's on par with a webforum with 3600 uniques per day. activitypub and the fediverse allows for more multimedia to be shared, faster and with less friction, so that explains some similarities and differences i see between these two decentralized services.

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
  - FalconSensei 4y ago
    Just my experience, but I think it might also be the type of users/instances. Haven't had much trouble now (perhaps my current instance blocks pleroma), but a few years ago I dropped Mastodon because I was getting the same amount of attrition than on Twitter. And every time, is was a Pleroma user. I even voted on a ticket to create 'local-only' posts, because I didn't wanna handle Pleroma users...
    - kkklppubgdzs 4y ago
      A lot of Pleroma users have different politics than Mastodon users because of the history of infighting between the developers, but this doesn't change the fact that people making stereotypes about the views of users based on the software their instance uses 1) hurts single user instances of Pleroma which are much easier to run than Mastodon and 2) makes the whole ActivityPub network more toxic and cliquish If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique That said I don't know why anyone would assume that the Fediverse would be better moderated than Twitter when the architecture of the protocol makes regulating "attrition" harder, not easier.
      - FalconSensei 4y ago
        > If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique At that time, it was just the fact that I was a windows user. And once because I posted a pic of me watching anime on my TV, and someone asked how I got screenshots for posting them on mastodon/blog later. User was definitely not pleased that I mentioned I got from /r/anime discussion thread for each episode But yeah, I'm definitely part of a clique of normies that just wanna use a social network to chat with people
    - Zak 4y ago
      If anything is going to strangle the usability of federated social networking, it's petty or indiscriminate server blocking. I just saw a popular tips account suggesting that everyone running a smaller server should block mastodon.social if it grew over 50% of the active userbase. Pleroma was the first ActivityPub server I tried running for myself. I picked it for technical reasons. I switched from it to Mastodon for UX reasons. I don't know anything about the politics of either lead developer, but I think both have crappy design decisions around how they display images by default. Of course, block anything you want on your single-user server, and any persistent sources of abusive behavior if you're running servers for other people.
everybodyknows 4y ago
From https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/ https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/ > Federation Issues > > Since every ActivityPub server implementation has a slightly different interpretation of the protocol, some servers don't quite federate properly with GoToSocial yet ... How's the specification/validation effort for ActivityPub progressing? https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  The only servers I currently have an issue with federating from my GtS instance are Honk instances and that's because (I'm reasonably sure) of a Honk weirdness. YMMV, obvs.
BryantD 4y ago
Anyone have any insight into the state of Takahe? Progress has slowed down a lot in the last two months.
- BryantD 4y ago
  Answering my own question: https://aeracode.org/2023/04/29/refactor-treat/ https://aeracode.org/2023/04/29/refactor-treat/ “I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US; both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to build, exactly.”
- manfre 4y ago
  I can't speak for Andrew, but my contributions to Takahe tapered off due to work killing my motivation to code after hours. It's also been feature complete enough for how I use it for many months. The biggest missing feature that others want is identity migration. I hacked in support to get my identity migrated to Takahe, but it's not something releasable to the general public.

RobotToaster 4y ago

>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. pleroma?

mariusor 4y ago

> Mastodon doesn't really have a good concept of unifying profiles in that way. I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. There's no need for multiple profiles if you can easily participate and be a part of both communities but at the same time not be a user of any of them. That's the benefit that Mastodon doesn't have, because their model of how federated communities should work predates ActivityPub's spec finalization. I think your use case would be satisfied if as a user you could "subscribe" to all activities generated on a server (or multiple), while your account would be on another one. ActivityPub makes this flow relatively simple, and one of the projects I'm working in the space has it as a design goal: small instances addressing themselves to communities with relatively low numbers (500-1k people), but at the same time the participation and receiving of updates from any other community in the network would be a click away.

scyzoryk_xyz 4y ago

Wondering same thing here. Isn’t there a possibility of a solution emerging in the coming years? If so why/why not?

fuzzehchat 4y ago

Pleroma is lightweight and fast.

madeofpalk 4y ago

> I really wish Mastodon wasn’t absorbing 95% of the ActivityPub hype Would be good to revisit this in 12 months. Medium and Tumblr seem to be keen to start to interop with ActivityPub. Supposedly even Meta is building on top of ActivityPub for a new service (which I can't seem to find a good source to link to, so who knows). I think ActivityPub is the new thing, so Mastodon has a bit of a first-ish mover advantage on it. Once all the big platforms get their proecjts out I think it'll get real interesting.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago

> A lot of recent arrivals want Twitter without the corporate ownership Which you can have on mastodon.social. Go sign up there if you want a non-corporate Twitter. Signups should be open now. Even if 90% of users are on a single instance, having a federated protocol matters as an insurance policy. If Oracle somehow assumes control of mastodon.social next year, everyone can move to some other instance and retain their connections. Furthermore, if someone else creates a better vision of social networking in the future, users will be able to switch one-by-one and continue communicating across platforms. There won't be a built-in imbalance due to the incumbent's network effect.

pkulak 4y ago

> 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! I fail to see the issue here. I'm not sure I care about seeing the most recent replies to something, from anyone, anywhere, vs the comments from the server I'm on, from the community I'm actively involved with. I like that my server doesn't bring in garbage from around the whole of the internet with perfect efficiency.

Gareth321 4y ago
While I agree, I believe we are in the minority.

armchairhacker 4y ago

Do those folks address the issue of ActivityPub transmitting massive amounts of data with 10000+ users? That's one of the main issues the big Mastodon communities have.

mariusor 4y ago
I would love to see some data about what you speak of, but a raw ActivityPub activity is maybe 1K in size. Propagating 1K sized payloads from 10K people (let's say that gives us about 10 per second) should not be that big of a deal in the age of streaming. I think unofficial censuses would put the total instance number at around 25000, so that's about the maximum number of outgoing messages a server would send. 25000(instances) * 10(messages/second) * 1000(bytes) = 256000000 bytes/s = 256MB/s of outgoing traffic Where Mastodon really gets it wrong is with the incessant caching of media that every instance does, and which is what maybe you are inadvertently thinking of.
- armchairhacker 4y ago
  It may just be Mastodon which has the problem. Still, competitors should make sure to not re-create the problem. I don't remember the specific comment but something about how one of the top Mastodon servers was transmitting 100TB of data a month, or some other else unreasonably high number. This server only had ~10,000 users.
  - mariusor 4y ago
    If my math doesn't fail me that's almost an order of magnitude lower than 256MB/s. :D I'm suprised I got so close with my back of the napkin calculation. But what would you consider reasonable data usage for 10K users? Is it maybe possible that a technology that's trying to demonopolyse social networks is probably not optimised for high user counts on individual servers?
    - armchairhacker 4y ago
      I don't know how much data Hacker News transmits but I'm certain it's under 100TB/month. I do know HN has >6 million requests per day and only runs on 1 server (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379). I'm sure Mastodon requires more data-per-user than HN, and a server with 1M+ users will be expensive. But I don't think 10,000 users is that much, and a server with that many shouldn't cost $1000+/mo to operate.

aquova 4y ago

> Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with inefficient links between them rather than one whole I think this is the key element that Mastodon needs to focus on to make the overall experience smoother. I've been using Mastodon for a while now, and the experience actually gets smoother the more you use it. Eventually you find enough people to follow that you forget many of them might be on instances other than your own, but when you're new, you mainly just have the local feed to go on. My account is honestly on a server with a community that doesn't quite fit my personal niche, and if it was smoother to switch servers I probably would, but I also don't feel limited by that choice as much as I initially did.

genewitch 4y ago

I run a misskey server on a VM on hardware dedicated to our stuff - we control the hypervisor on the boxes, we "own the IP space", manage backups, etc. Misskey is a federated activitypub instance; and in my opinion it is better than mastodon at being a "twitter replacement." I checked the dashboard for my four user instance (myself and 3 others, total) and we're currently pub/sub to ~~5200~~ 5219 instances. I added a curated list of "journalists" across the federated activitypub realm, around 1300. So now i have basically the "news" part of twitter, 24/7, without all of the jokes, memes, and trash found on twitter. I also am on fosstodon, but I maintain that as a backup for another mastodon instance i have an account on, where both the maintainer and the public face of the instance have a "you get what you pay for" / "that's tough, suck it up" mentality toward maintenance and downtime (they're approaching less than 1 nine for the month of april). I am unsure of how many accounts fosstodon has, the local feed is pretty slow, so i'd guess between 1000-5000 users, the other mastodon instance is capped at 10,000 users, and a job removes everyone who has not logged in for a year, and signups are once a year (and maybe a thing of the past, to hear the "leader" talk). I really like misskey. I'd probably like something else more, as i can't admin misskey competently - most of the online help, advanced documentation, etc is in Japanese. For the record: currently 600GB attached; 130GB used, 24GB for / and 105GB for the misskey/files folder. It has 8GB of ram and 4 threads; it uses all 8 without OOM, and ~5% of the CPU. I don't really know the network throughput, but it's on par with a webforum with 3600 uniques per day. activitypub and the fediverse allows for more multimedia to be shared, faster and with less friction, so that explains some similarities and differences i see between these two decentralized services.