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> Mastodon culture has taken a scolding, censorious tone This is the main issue I see with Mastodon. Any instance is administrated by a real person and this pe

by rckt 2y ago

> Mastodon culture has taken a scolding, censorious tone This is the main issue I see with Mastodon. Any instance is administrated by a real person and this person has views of their own. And they attract people like them to the instance, forming a kind of an invisible ruling committee. And if you happen to post anything that goes against their beliefs, preferences, views, you get fucked. For me this is just ridiculous. A federated social media where every instance can be an authoritarian state. Well, no thanks. In my opinion what would help in this case is an ability to set up your single account instead of a whole Mastodon instance. I would gladly do this. This way the worst people can do to my account - block me on theirs, and I'm completely fine with it. Currently if you fall into disfavor of the instance administration, you can be restricted and banned in seconds.

vidarh 2y ago
My main Mastodon account is a single-user instance. Mastodon is heavy-duty for that compared to what it could be, and so a better single-user server would be nice, but it's also not that big a deal. Incidentally, I'm working on an app server with ActivityPub support at its core, and I have pondered giving it sufficient compatibility with Mastodon to allow repurposing it as a lightweight instance.
- rckt 2y ago
  Nice, I'm looking forward for something like this. As for the "not a big deal", I get it. But still, it feels overkilling to have a whole instance that has the same capabilities as one with thousands of users, just for yourself.
  - vidarh 2y ago
    I mean, I think most of the overkill of Mastodon comes from design choices that stems from building it on Rails. It's possible to do Rails in a lean way, but the "done thing" in Rails is to build a big monolith talking to a full RDBMS, and use Sidekiq for jobs and, and ... I love Ruby, probably more than is good for my sanity (half my desktop stack is written in Ruby), but Rails has always come across to me as overcomplicating things.
- zimpenfish 2y ago
  > a better single-user server would be nice There's GotoSocial[0], Takahē[1], epicyon[2], etc. [0] https://gotosocial.org https://gotosocial.org [1] https://jointakahe.org https://jointakahe.org [2] https://libreserver.org/epicyon/ https://libreserver.org/epicyon/
  - vidarh 1y ago
    Thanks for the suggestions, but all of those seems like marginal improvements at best to me. If I'm going to have to read through a lot of installation instructions, I might as well keep Mastodon... When I was thinking of a "better single-user server", I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container - the Mastodon resource use is less of a problem (unless you run a big instance) than the complexity of it. I do appreciate the suggestions, though. If anything, looking at how others have handled Mastodon API support will be useful.
    - zimpenfish 1y ago
      > I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container GotoSocial is a single binary.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        That got lost to me in the long installation instructions, and the presence of a docker-compose file I didn't look at because its mere presence suggested multiple containers, but I see now it only includes one... To me, the length of those installation instructions is themselves an indication this is still not what I'm after.
        zimpenfish 1y ago
        Yeah, I can see that they've gone for the "To install GotoSocial, first you must create the universe..." kind of approach to their instructions. Which is a shame because it's just "Download a release, unpack, edit the config, off you go."[0] They could do with a pithy Quickstart page for people who already have domains, servers, etc. [0] My installation is from source and I'd never really seen their installation instructions as they are now.
zorked 2y ago
The censorious culture has become more relaxed over the last couple of years but it's still a problem. I miss the culture of early Internet systems administrators that saw their services as protocols to be integrated. Mastodon admins are too interested in shaping society. Let the messages flow, the users have enough ways to block stuff they don't want. Too many people started services because they wanted an axe not a network.
- rckt 2y ago
  Man, exactly. I left Instagram, because they started to block my account, because I had a link to my Mastodon account in my profile. And then, coming to Mastodon, I'm getting exactly the same. But now not for commercial, but purely personal reasons. With this approach it doesn't matter if it's a federated, open-sourced or not. If it's not welcoming, then no reason even getting in there.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

by rckt 2y ago

vidarh 2y ago

My main Mastodon account is a single-user instance. Mastodon is heavy-duty for that compared to what it could be, and so a better single-user server would be nice, but it's also not that big a deal. Incidentally, I'm working on an app server with ActivityPub support at its core, and I have pondered giving it sufficient compatibility with Mastodon to allow repurposing it as a lightweight instance.

rckt 2y ago
Nice, I'm looking forward for something like this. As for the "not a big deal", I get it. But still, it feels overkilling to have a whole instance that has the same capabilities as one with thousands of users, just for yourself.
- vidarh 2y ago
  I mean, I think most of the overkill of Mastodon comes from design choices that stems from building it on Rails. It's possible to do Rails in a lean way, but the "done thing" in Rails is to build a big monolith talking to a full RDBMS, and use Sidekiq for jobs and, and ... I love Ruby, probably more than is good for my sanity (half my desktop stack is written in Ruby), but Rails has always come across to me as overcomplicating things.
zimpenfish 2y ago
> a better single-user server would be nice There's GotoSocial[0], Takahē[1], epicyon[2], etc. [0] https://gotosocial.org https://gotosocial.org [1] https://jointakahe.org https://jointakahe.org [2] https://libreserver.org/epicyon/ https://libreserver.org/epicyon/
- vidarh 1y ago
  Thanks for the suggestions, but all of those seems like marginal improvements at best to me. If I'm going to have to read through a lot of installation instructions, I might as well keep Mastodon... When I was thinking of a "better single-user server", I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container - the Mastodon resource use is less of a problem (unless you run a big instance) than the complexity of it. I do appreciate the suggestions, though. If anything, looking at how others have handled Mastodon API support will be useful.
  - zimpenfish 1y ago
    > I was thinking more in terms of a single binary, or a single container GotoSocial is a single binary.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      That got lost to me in the long installation instructions, and the presence of a docker-compose file I didn't look at because its mere presence suggested multiple containers, but I see now it only includes one... To me, the length of those installation instructions is themselves an indication this is still not what I'm after.
      - zimpenfish 1y ago
        Yeah, I can see that they've gone for the "To install GotoSocial, first you must create the universe..." kind of approach to their instructions. Which is a shame because it's just "Download a release, unpack, edit the config, off you go."[0] They could do with a pithy Quickstart page for people who already have domains, servers, etc. [0] My installation is from source and I'd never really seen their installation instructions as they are now.

zorked 2y ago

The censorious culture has become more relaxed over the last couple of years but it's still a problem. I miss the culture of early Internet systems administrators that saw their services as protocols to be integrated. Mastodon admins are too interested in shaping society. Let the messages flow, the users have enough ways to block stuff they don't want. Too many people started services because they wanted an axe not a network.

rckt 2y ago
Man, exactly. I left Instagram, because they started to block my account, because I had a link to my Mastodon account in my profile. And then, coming to Mastodon, I'm getting exactly the same. But now not for commercial, but purely personal reasons. With this approach it doesn't matter if it's a federated, open-sourced or not. If it's not welcoming, then no reason even getting in there.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]