3 ms·

Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance. That doesn't really have much to do with whether it rivals other socia

Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance. That doesn't really have much to do with whether it rivals other social networks or not. But I agree, a better headline would be "Mastodon is Doomed as a Twitter replacement". It's fine for Mastodon to not want to be that. But at the same time a lot of recent arrivals were perfectly happy on Twitter and have only moved because of Musk's shenanigans. So long term they'll probably jump ship if a viable alternative comes along.

BeetleB 4y ago
> Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance. Correction: Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running a large instance. I know people running their own instances, with less than 10 users, yet they are happily tooting with people in other instances. They aren't missing out on something that I, on one of the largest instances, have.
- afavour 4y ago
  Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier?
  - prmoustache 4y ago
    > Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier? If you have a user that starts following 10k user in a short time, you have a spam bot and not a user. The fediverse is not made in such a way that your social circle grows quickly. You usually starts by following people on your own instance, then people whose content is boosted by them and it only happens slowly and gradually.
    - kjjhhhhyy 4y ago
      No, this isn't really true, once you interact with another homeserver Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content. The users it finds aren't necessarily ones you've interacted with -- I know from running single server instances I stopped running an instance because of this functionality. I was running Mastodon on my home Internet and quickly became concerned about the image content it was downloading from users I hadn't interacted with, while I wasn't monitoring the server There is a LOT of lolicon content on the Fediverse and NOTHING is worth the risk of running a server that might download material that's considered to be CSAM to my local computer while it is unsupervised So you have to worry about both the quantity of content it downloads and what that content is As an admin: no thanks.
      - BeetleB 4y ago
        > Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content. Your statement is a hint to the problem. From what I find on the Internet, you can still communicate/follow people on other servers without getting their timelines. It's just that the default setting is to pull everything from those relays and you need to disable it. With that setting, you'll get everything people you follow on other instances, but not more. The "Federated timeline" tab will remain empty.
- prmoustache 4y ago
  This. I have two separate identities on 2 instances. One has only 40 members, on which I am a moderator, which is a subset of a forum's community and both being funded with donation and a yearly fee to be allowed to post ads in the local marketplace. The other one is much larger but runs on a single Hetzner VPS and is also funded with donation. Admin recently switched registration to manual approval, probably to control and limit the amount of accounts. If I ever have to run my own fediverse/activity pub server/community, I would definitely put a limit on the active accounts I would serve and have an housekeeping rule to clean up inactive profiles.
- gnramires 4y ago
  Moreover, I am on a large instance (social.coop) and living happily -- I pay a monthly fee and I'm confident it'll last pretty much forever (they also have a governance plan, which I find important!). I also support mastodon itself. Given the number of large servers that are financially healthy, [1] I don't expect this trend to break so soon. Given this voluntary nature however, I think the devs might be underestimating the importance of low running costs... but at scale I'm sure efficiency will improve (in the last case through alternative servers!). I'm more genuinely worried about Mastodon and other parts of Fediverse forgetting why they were made in the first place. They are made as a network for the users, not for selling ads. They can make every decision with the users wellbeing in mind and this is incredibly powerful in today's world. (if they stick to that, I'm sure they'll find a lot of success) Selling out as the author seems to suggest would make them into a boring Twitter clone as far as I can tell. [1] not only mastodon.social, also others like mstdn.social, fosstodon.org, and more -- if not, check with your instance maintainer :)

BeetleB 4y ago

> Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance. Correction: Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running a large instance. I know people running their own instances, with less than 10 users, yet they are happily tooting with people in other instances. They aren't missing out on something that I, on one of the largest instances, have.

afavour 4y ago
Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier?
- prmoustache 4y ago
  > Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier? If you have a user that starts following 10k user in a short time, you have a spam bot and not a user. The fediverse is not made in such a way that your social circle grows quickly. You usually starts by following people on your own instance, then people whose content is boosted by them and it only happens slowly and gradually.
  - kjjhhhhyy 4y ago
    No, this isn't really true, once you interact with another homeserver Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content. The users it finds aren't necessarily ones you've interacted with -- I know from running single server instances I stopped running an instance because of this functionality. I was running Mastodon on my home Internet and quickly became concerned about the image content it was downloading from users I hadn't interacted with, while I wasn't monitoring the server There is a LOT of lolicon content on the Fediverse and NOTHING is worth the risk of running a server that might download material that's considered to be CSAM to my local computer while it is unsupervised So you have to worry about both the quantity of content it downloads and what that content is As an admin: no thanks.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      > Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content. Your statement is a hint to the problem. From what I find on the Internet, you can still communicate/follow people on other servers without getting their timelines. It's just that the default setting is to pull everything from those relays and you need to disable it. With that setting, you'll get everything people you follow on other instances, but not more. The "Federated timeline" tab will remain empty.
prmoustache 4y ago
This. I have two separate identities on 2 instances. One has only 40 members, on which I am a moderator, which is a subset of a forum's community and both being funded with donation and a yearly fee to be allowed to post ads in the local marketplace. The other one is much larger but runs on a single Hetzner VPS and is also funded with donation. Admin recently switched registration to manual approval, probably to control and limit the amount of accounts. If I ever have to run my own fediverse/activity pub server/community, I would definitely put a limit on the active accounts I would serve and have an housekeeping rule to clean up inactive profiles.
gnramires 4y ago
Moreover, I am on a large instance (social.coop) and living happily -- I pay a monthly fee and I'm confident it'll last pretty much forever (they also have a governance plan, which I find important!). I also support mastodon itself. Given the number of large servers that are financially healthy, [1] I don't expect this trend to break so soon. Given this voluntary nature however, I think the devs might be underestimating the importance of low running costs... but at scale I'm sure efficiency will improve (in the last case through alternative servers!). I'm more genuinely worried about Mastodon and other parts of Fediverse forgetting why they were made in the first place. They are made as a network for the users, not for selling ads. They can make every decision with the users wellbeing in mind and this is incredibly powerful in today's world. (if they stick to that, I'm sure they'll find a lot of success) Selling out as the author seems to suggest would make them into a boring Twitter clone as far as I can tell. [1] not only mastodon.social, also others like mstdn.social, fosstodon.org, and more -- if not, check with your instance maintainer :)