8 ms·

The difference between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads

69 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

kn0where 2y ago
Genuine question: is there any technological/scaling problem with Mastodon that actually needs solving, and that the AT protocol would fix? What reason is there to split different parts of their backend tech stack between different “operators” with different policies? Does this separation of concerns improve the performance (or other desirable attribute) of the decentralized network versus Mastodon’s approach?
- criddell 2y ago
  The one I hear about most often is account portability. Your Mastodon account is on a specific server whereas the AT protocol account is owned by the user. You can move it wherever you want. It helps protected you from being banned or from losing your account if your server is shut down. Somebody archived a thread that discusses some of the motivation for AT: https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/topics/thread-archive-about-bluesky/ https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/topics/thread-archive-about-...
  - jrm4 2y ago
    This feels like a decent idea that will never actually work (or matter) for most people, kind of like self-signed PGP emails and such? They're solving an unreal problem that can be solved by "human trust" in a Mastodon-like system. Like, hey everyone, I'm no longer joebob@bluemastodon, I'm joebob@purplemastodon.
    - mperham 2y ago
      And in fact, Mastodon has a mechanism to migrate your account between servers. It has serious limitations (your posts don't follow you, followers do) but it's the best they can do within the AP spec.
      - wizzwizz4 2y ago
        Those limitations are due to the Mastodon software, not the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub provides a mechanism that can technically be used for both post and follower migration – not that I'd suggest using it for that – but Mastodon's account migration feature is something separate. There's no technical reason it couldn't support post migration, except that nobody's put the work (largely social) in to get it past Gargron and implemented.
    - krapp 2y ago
      The problem is, none of that is stopping anyone else from being joebob@greenmastodon unless you get there first.
      - jrm4 2y ago
        This is already an old-as-dirt, solved, if imperfectly, problem. See, e.g. steampowered.com
    - cortesoft 2y ago
      And if someone else has created accounts for `joebob@<all the colors>mastodon`, what do you do? And what if they all start claiming to be the original joebob@bluemastodon?
      - kstrauser 2y ago
        What if I register the email address cortesoft@gmail.com or cortesoft@outlook.com and claim to be the original? More broadly, there are lots of John Smiths in the world. Context is everything: the John Smith in my Bay Area office is different from the John Smith who makes the news in Boston.
        cortesoft 2y ago
        Right, but my point is that this is a problem that the AT protocol is trying to solve. You pointing out that it is a problem elsewhere is exactly the point; why not try to solve it? This is especially important for a federated system where individual servers may come and go, and you want to have the ability to move your account if the server goes down or starts doing something shady. Part of the reason people choose a centralized social media service is because they know their account will last and they can build a reputation. Unless you can move your account and maintain your reputation, a federated system won't have that trait.
        criddell 2y ago
        The AT protocol is designed to fix this. If email ran on AT, you could take your cortesoft@gmail.com account and move it to Microsoft or even your own server.
        kstrauser 2y ago
        Understood, but... was that in dire need of fixing? We're all pretty acclimated to it over the decades we've used email. That isn't to say we can't or shouldn't improve things. It's more that I'm not convinced the problem here is important enough to justify the complexity of the solution.
- abdullahkhalids 2y ago
  Isn't Mastodon supposed to not-scale? Basically, every server should be small enough that it can be reasonably moderated manually. If Mastodon scales to millions of users, we will be back to needing automated methods for moderation which have huge positive and negative errors. Mastodon would likely make adoption much easier if these install [1] instructions were replaced by `apt-get install mastodon`, and configuration [2] was done in UI, rather than some text file. Even that is too difficult. Hosting a mastodon instance should be as technically easy as starting a discord server. [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/ [2] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/config/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/config/
  - tkellogg 2y ago
    There's 2 ways mastodon can scale (or not): 1. Per-server 2. Network-wide Moderation load is per-server scaling, mostly. I'd argue that if the load gets to be too much, moderators do less moderating and people decide to migrate to other servers. That's kind of a clean scaling strategy, tbh. However, adding servers isn't a great story. There's n^2 network connections (worst case) that need to be made to service all subscriptions. That's definitely a scaling problem, although probably addressable via an architecture inspired by gossip protocols.
  - kstrauser 2y ago
    There's a certain amount of irreducible complexity. There are a lot of things to configure! For instance, what database server do I want to connect to? What mailserver to use for transactional messages, and how do I authenticate to it? Where do I store images? Which Redis do I point at? Someone who wants to avoid all that can register with a hosted service like masto.host that does it all for them.
    - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
      The average mastodon server has 1k users, and the median has likely much fewer [1]. All of these choices are immaterial for the median server. Just set reasonable defaults so that local gym manager's son/daughter can set them up with the gym's server in a couple of hours. And then leave these instructions for the advanced users who want to pay money for large servers. [1] https://mastodon-analytics.com/ https://mastodon-analytics.com/
- jrm4 2y ago
  I asked this same question to someone on bluesky who worked for it, and I didn't get a remotely coherent answer. If anything, it feels like the "identity portability" actually sets you up for the exact same kind of centralization we're trying to get away from. While I get that, "lots of servers and easy to create and destroy accounts" may not be the best for adoption/popularity, it definitely feels like the long run smartest way to go about it.
- josephg 2y ago
  The feature I’ve heard the Bluesky devs talk a lot about is aggregating likes across multiple servers. And search. As far as I can tell, they want Bluesky to be as fast and scalable as Twitter while being decentralised. If a celebrity with millions of followers uses Bluesky, all users across all servers should be able to follow them and like their tweets.
- jauntywundrkind 2y ago
  Brian Newbold has some posts contrasting the design decisions of AP vs Bsky, in reply to this EFF article, > a design tradeoff between atproto appviews and mastodon instances is that atproto appviews are generally "big world" and index the entire network, so the cost to run the indexing component scales with the size of network. (there is also read-volume scaling, separately) > in activitypub, the scaling needs of an instance roughly go with the number of users, and the volume of interactions they have with entire network (read and write). so instances can start small (fewer resources) > the point I was getting at is that actually you can have an atproto appview which doesn't index the entire network, just PDS instance of interest. > this has some "cheap and totally independent" benefits, but trades off against not being able to see and interact with entire network > aka, "full" appviews are more resource-intensive to get started, but have huge value. > (also, the protocol is designed to make it way way cheaper than web crawling or other trad indexing, both in terms of compute resources and in terms of admin/ops labor) https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3kva4vxi45s2q https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3kva4vxi45s2q Bsky's as a distributed distribution mechanism has yet to be tested in any major way, but the premise of bulk transmission seems more built-in where-as AP was crafted more as a person-to-person relationship. I'm less familiar with Mastadon's own protocols. It does seem like trying to keep Mastadon's sidekiq egress queues from flooding is a damned hard job for a lot of growing instances, at least it was ~2 years ago when I was active there.
  - deleted 2y ago
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rc_mob 2y ago
I love EFF but also this article is very biased but also very thorough. Good read.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  What bias did you observe?
  - freedomben 2y ago
    If I had to guess I would guess they meant against Twitter. IMHO the EFF should be biased against Twitter given their mission, so I wouldn't even consider it to be bias personally.
  - Kye 2y ago
    There should be a social norm where if you're going to call out a bias, you should name the bias (at a minimum) and share the bias you see that bias from so readers can calibrate their interpretation. Without it, we're in a situation like this where someone has to ask and others try to work it out and a lot of time is spent trying to understand the claim rather than have a discussion.
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pipeline_peak 2y ago
I'm not optimistic about non tech people adopting mastodon.192.168.555.2.xproxy.remoteinstance2452456a1.mirror.com. Threads just makes Meta look even more uncool and desperate to catch up. I'm sure they'll do everything in their power to advertise across Instagram and Facebook. Non tech guy says : "Bluewhat?"
- krapp 2y ago
  >I'm not optimistic about non tech people easily logging into mastodon.192.168.555.2.xproxy.remoteinstance2452456a1.mirror.com. Why are you trolling? Mastodon instances have normal URLs like https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social, and you can just log in there like any other site. And there's a ton of "non-tech" people on Mastodon.. in fact the people who seem whine the most about how hard it is are the "techies" on HN. It's weird.
  - pipeline_peak 2y ago
    Your very own host is https://krapp.masto.host/@krapp https://krapp.masto.host/@krapp All im saying is it’s not a good look as opposed to a single simple Twitter.com I’m obviously exaggerating but when I click this link all I see is a scattered mess that the majority of people don’t want to put up with. The non foss people who could care less about the musk takeover enough to actually jump ship. https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers I feel like I’m playing CS 1.6 or something
    - krapp 2y ago
      It's a single user, hosted instance so just https://krapp.masto.host https://krapp.masto.host would also work, it's just (unnecessarily) pointing to a user account. It's not that weird - this very forum is a subdomain of ycombinator, people used to host their sites under geocities and tripod and the like. I agree that instance discovery is a problem - mostly because identity isn't portable on Mastodon so you're kind of making a commitment, but it clearly isn't an insurmountable level of complexity for a lot of people to deal with. Most people will just gravitate to the biggest instances and that's fine. One of the lessons I think the fragmentation of Twitter is teaching us is that the user experience doesn't have to be as simple and frictionless as possible.. people will put up with some rough edges if they want to.
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69 points by sohkamyung 2y ago

Genuine question: is there any technological/scaling problem with Mastodon that actually needs solving, and that the AT protocol would fix? What reason is there to split different parts of their backend tech stack between different “operators” with different policies? Does this separation of concerns improve the performance (or other desirable attribute) of the decentralized network versus Mastodon’s approach?

criddell 2y ago
The one I hear about most often is account portability. Your Mastodon account is on a specific server whereas the AT protocol account is owned by the user. You can move it wherever you want. It helps protected you from being banned or from losing your account if your server is shut down. Somebody archived a thread that discusses some of the motivation for AT: https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/topics/thread-archive-about-bluesky/ https://fedimeister.onyxbits.de/topics/thread-archive-about-...
- jrm4 2y ago
  This feels like a decent idea that will never actually work (or matter) for most people, kind of like self-signed PGP emails and such? They're solving an unreal problem that can be solved by "human trust" in a Mastodon-like system. Like, hey everyone, I'm no longer joebob@bluemastodon, I'm joebob@purplemastodon.
  - mperham 2y ago
    And in fact, Mastodon has a mechanism to migrate your account between servers. It has serious limitations (your posts don't follow you, followers do) but it's the best they can do within the AP spec.
    - wizzwizz4 2y ago
      Those limitations are due to the Mastodon software, not the ActivityPub protocol. ActivityPub provides a mechanism that can technically be used for both post and follower migration – not that I'd suggest using it for that – but Mastodon's account migration feature is something separate. There's no technical reason it couldn't support post migration, except that nobody's put the work (largely social) in to get it past Gargron and implemented.
  - krapp 2y ago
    The problem is, none of that is stopping anyone else from being joebob@greenmastodon unless you get there first.
    - jrm4 2y ago
      This is already an old-as-dirt, solved, if imperfectly, problem. See, e.g. steampowered.com
  - cortesoft 2y ago
    And if someone else has created accounts for `joebob@<all the colors>mastodon`, what do you do? And what if they all start claiming to be the original joebob@bluemastodon?
    - kstrauser 2y ago
      What if I register the email address cortesoft@gmail.com or cortesoft@outlook.com and claim to be the original? More broadly, there are lots of John Smiths in the world. Context is everything: the John Smith in my Bay Area office is different from the John Smith who makes the news in Boston.
      - cortesoft 2y ago
        Right, but my point is that this is a problem that the AT protocol is trying to solve. You pointing out that it is a problem elsewhere is exactly the point; why not try to solve it? This is especially important for a federated system where individual servers may come and go, and you want to have the ability to move your account if the server goes down or starts doing something shady. Part of the reason people choose a centralized social media service is because they know their account will last and they can build a reputation. Unless you can move your account and maintain your reputation, a federated system won't have that trait.
      - criddell 2y ago
        The AT protocol is designed to fix this. If email ran on AT, you could take your cortesoft@gmail.com account and move it to Microsoft or even your own server.
        kstrauser 2y ago
        Understood, but... was that in dire need of fixing? We're all pretty acclimated to it over the decades we've used email. That isn't to say we can't or shouldn't improve things. It's more that I'm not convinced the problem here is important enough to justify the complexity of the solution.
abdullahkhalids 2y ago
Isn't Mastodon supposed to not-scale? Basically, every server should be small enough that it can be reasonably moderated manually. If Mastodon scales to millions of users, we will be back to needing automated methods for moderation which have huge positive and negative errors. Mastodon would likely make adoption much easier if these install [1] instructions were replaced by `apt-get install mastodon`, and configuration [2] was done in UI, rather than some text file. Even that is too difficult. Hosting a mastodon instance should be as technically easy as starting a discord server. [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/ [2] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/config/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/config/
- tkellogg 2y ago
  There's 2 ways mastodon can scale (or not): 1. Per-server 2. Network-wide Moderation load is per-server scaling, mostly. I'd argue that if the load gets to be too much, moderators do less moderating and people decide to migrate to other servers. That's kind of a clean scaling strategy, tbh. However, adding servers isn't a great story. There's n^2 network connections (worst case) that need to be made to service all subscriptions. That's definitely a scaling problem, although probably addressable via an architecture inspired by gossip protocols.
- kstrauser 2y ago
  There's a certain amount of irreducible complexity. There are a lot of things to configure! For instance, what database server do I want to connect to? What mailserver to use for transactional messages, and how do I authenticate to it? Where do I store images? Which Redis do I point at? Someone who wants to avoid all that can register with a hosted service like masto.host that does it all for them.
  - abdullahkhalids 2y ago
    The average mastodon server has 1k users, and the median has likely much fewer [1]. All of these choices are immaterial for the median server. Just set reasonable defaults so that local gym manager's son/daughter can set them up with the gym's server in a couple of hours. And then leave these instructions for the advanced users who want to pay money for large servers. [1] https://mastodon-analytics.com/ https://mastodon-analytics.com/
jrm4 2y ago
I asked this same question to someone on bluesky who worked for it, and I didn't get a remotely coherent answer. If anything, it feels like the "identity portability" actually sets you up for the exact same kind of centralization we're trying to get away from. While I get that, "lots of servers and easy to create and destroy accounts" may not be the best for adoption/popularity, it definitely feels like the long run smartest way to go about it.
josephg 2y ago
The feature I’ve heard the Bluesky devs talk a lot about is aggregating likes across multiple servers. And search. As far as I can tell, they want Bluesky to be as fast and scalable as Twitter while being decentralised. If a celebrity with millions of followers uses Bluesky, all users across all servers should be able to follow them and like their tweets.
jauntywundrkind 2y ago
Brian Newbold has some posts contrasting the design decisions of AP vs Bsky, in reply to this EFF article, > a design tradeoff between atproto appviews and mastodon instances is that atproto appviews are generally "big world" and index the entire network, so the cost to run the indexing component scales with the size of network. (there is also read-volume scaling, separately) > in activitypub, the scaling needs of an instance roughly go with the number of users, and the volume of interactions they have with entire network (read and write). so instances can start small (fewer resources) > the point I was getting at is that actually you can have an atproto appview which doesn't index the entire network, just PDS instance of interest. > this has some "cheap and totally independent" benefits, but trades off against not being able to see and interact with entire network > aka, "full" appviews are more resource-intensive to get started, but have huge value. > (also, the protocol is designed to make it way way cheaper than web crawling or other trad indexing, both in terms of compute resources and in terms of admin/ops labor) https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3kva4vxi45s2q https://bsky.app/profile/bnewbold.net/post/3kva4vxi45s2q Bsky's as a distributed distribution mechanism has yet to be tested in any major way, but the premise of bulk transmission seems more built-in where-as AP was crafted more as a person-to-person relationship. I'm less familiar with Mastadon's own protocols. It does seem like trying to keep Mastadon's sidekiq egress queues from flooding is a damned hard job for a lot of growing instances, at least it was ~2 years ago when I was active there.
- deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago

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rc_mob 2y ago

I love EFF but also this article is very biased but also very thorough. Good read.

kstrauser 2y ago
What bias did you observe?
- freedomben 2y ago
  If I had to guess I would guess they meant against Twitter. IMHO the EFF should be biased against Twitter given their mission, so I wouldn't even consider it to be bias personally.
- Kye 2y ago
  There should be a social norm where if you're going to call out a bias, you should name the bias (at a minimum) and share the bias you see that bias from so readers can calibrate their interpretation. Without it, we're in a situation like this where someone has to ask and others try to work it out and a lot of time is spent trying to understand the claim rather than have a discussion.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

pipeline_peak 2y ago

I'm not optimistic about non tech people adopting mastodon.192.168.555.2.xproxy.remoteinstance2452456a1.mirror.com. Threads just makes Meta look even more uncool and desperate to catch up. I'm sure they'll do everything in their power to advertise across Instagram and Facebook. Non tech guy says : "Bluewhat?"

krapp 2y ago
>I'm not optimistic about non tech people easily logging into mastodon.192.168.555.2.xproxy.remoteinstance2452456a1.mirror.com. Why are you trolling? Mastodon instances have normal URLs like https://mastodon.social https://mastodon.social, and you can just log in there like any other site. And there's a ton of "non-tech" people on Mastodon.. in fact the people who seem whine the most about how hard it is are the "techies" on HN. It's weird.
- pipeline_peak 2y ago
  Your very own host is https://krapp.masto.host/@krapp https://krapp.masto.host/@krapp All im saying is it’s not a good look as opposed to a single simple Twitter.com I’m obviously exaggerating but when I click this link all I see is a scattered mess that the majority of people don’t want to put up with. The non foss people who could care less about the musk takeover enough to actually jump ship. https://joinmastodon.org/servers https://joinmastodon.org/servers I feel like I’m playing CS 1.6 or something
  - krapp 2y ago
    It's a single user, hosted instance so just https://krapp.masto.host https://krapp.masto.host would also work, it's just (unnecessarily) pointing to a user account. It's not that weird - this very forum is a subdomain of ycombinator, people used to host their sites under geocities and tripod and the like. I agree that instance discovery is a problem - mostly because identity isn't portable on Mastodon so you're kind of making a commitment, but it clearly isn't an insurmountable level of complexity for a lot of people to deal with. Most people will just gravitate to the biggest instances and that's fine. One of the lessons I think the fragmentation of Twitter is teaching us is that the user experience doesn't have to be as simple and frictionless as possible.. people will put up with some rough edges if they want to.

deleted 2y ago

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