So I do not see any advantage in federated system. It’s cool as technology and all, but completely unprepared for huge traffic or real life scenarios.
PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance.
what, why? The load is hardly that high.
An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.
For reference my work laptop (8 logical cores, so 4+HT? 32GB RAM) can handle 100k rows/second sustained inserts into postgres 14 with some batch jobs I'm working on. You can buffer http requests into batches and easily handle way more than 10k/s on a server while still providing synchronous semantics and reasonable latency to the client (e.g. flush batches every 100 ms).
I doubt Mastodon is designed for that kind of scalability, but most techies could probably afford to run Twitter as a hobby if they knew what they're doing and they weren't trying to do all the analytics stuff to monetize it/just wanted to provide the service.
You have no idea what are you talking about.
You can easily batch writes into neat transactions: make a queue, have your POST handler write (row, callback) onto the queue and await the callback. Have the queue reader grab a chunk, push it to the db in batch, and execute all of the callbacks on commit. The callbacks return a 200 to the client, or 500 if the commit failed. This can all happen fast enough to be done in "real time" (however fast you want your queue worker to flush batches).
You can do all of this in a couple dozen lines of code with something like Scala/ZIO.
Computationally, it is totally doable. The biggest constraint is the cost of storage.
When I said that you can't batch, I meant that each tweet will be at least one transaction. Async write with batching like you suggested will have a horrible user-experience, also your client often is a mobile device or browser - how do you deliver a callback from server there?
Nah, how many inserts your laptop can make and how many tweets created in a unit of time are two irrelevant metrics.
You don't. The callback is on the server before it ever responds to the request.
Here, I slapped this together to demonstrate the technique[0]
Your HTTP route handler becomes
override def create(body: String): Task[Long] = {
for
rspP <- zio.Promise.make[Nothing,Long]
_ <- createQueue.offer(InsertRequest(body, rspP))
rsp <- rspP.await
yield (rsp)
}
_ <- ZStream.fromQueue(createQueue)
.groupedWithin(8192, 10.milliseconds)
.run(ZSink.foreach(repo.createChunk)).forkDaemon
The worker does a bulk db insert, and completes the promises with the generated ids.
Similar techniques should work on read batching, but I haven't tried that. You can also speed that up some more with the COPY protocol, but IIRC you need to be more careful about escaping/SQL injection.
On my 6 year old mid-range desktop (this CPU[1] and this disk[2]) this program can process ~30k `create`s per second. For about $1500, I could buy a new computer with a Ryzen 9 7950 with 4x the core count/8x the thread count and 2x the single-threaded performance, so around ~10x more processing power, 128 GB of RAM, and a Samsung 980 Pro SSD, which can do 1M Write IOPS (25x more than my SSD) or 5GB/s sequential writes (10x more). So a $1500 computer with a single disk should be able to do around 300k/s. PCIe gen 5 is now coming out, which will allow for another doubling of disk performance.
128GB of RAM means you can keep at least 100M rows worth of index in memory. It's not that expensive (under $10k) to build a server with 1TB of RAM.
Totally feasible for a hobbyist to do without tons of tricky optimization (the code I posted is purely functional Scala!); people spend $20k on a jetski or $80k on a truck. Like I said, the most expensive part is going to be the storage, but you could do something like only store the most recent 1000 tweets per person, and charge $10 to bump that up to the most recent 10 million tweets or something. You'd come out at a substantial profit with that model if you got a few thousand takers. Similarly you could charge to let someone follow more than a few thousand people so you could pay for a read replica or two.
[0] https://github.com/ndriscoll/twit/commit/19b245677b978b42a6f...
[1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-6600K...
[2] https://www.disctech.com/SanDisk-SDSSDHP-256G-256GB-SATA-SSD
> By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)?
"That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this example. Partly, yes. But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance. Who's to say it couldn't be run just like an email client with the right ideas and effort? It's such an extreme example that I'm not even sure it's useful to discuss.
What traffic is it prepared for? It would be interesting for you to provide the numbers and the evidence which backs this up.
As for real life scenarios...there are upwards of a million people using it right now. I've made friends, networked professionally and found several homes there. I am literally a real life scenario and so are the people behind most of the posts there.
And today you are right about "anyone can start their own instance", but it's a darn sight easier than running your own twitter.com, and it'll get easier every year.
Twitter pays people money to keep their service running, so there's that incentive.
> As for real life scenarios...there are upwards of a million people using it right now. I've made friends, networked professionally and found several homes there. I am literally a real life scenario and so are the people behind most of the posts there.
Twitter is, say, 300m MAUs. That would mean the volunteer Mastodon infra would have to increase 300x (assuming scaling is linear, and the Mastodon community hits Mastodon as hard as Twitter users hit Twitter) to cope with similar traffic numbers.
For servers that run Mastodon.
> But that sort of total exodus would mean a lot of additional people contributing ideas and code to the Fediverse, not just servers, but by making it easier to run your own instance.
Most users aren’t interested in contributing anything to the platform. Social media platforms popularity lays in simplicity. No one wants to run anything, just use service without any hassle.
> there are upwards of a million people using it right now.
Compare that to 200m+ users of Twitter sending 500m+ messages daily. I bet Mastdon can handle this without a sweat.
Running a server that can cope with thousands of users would probably cost just a few dollars a month. Donations would be more than sufficient.
It is not early days anymore and no non-technical user is interested in hosting their own servers for chatting with another person. They don't care about decentralization as even if they tried they will recentralize to the main Mastodon instance.
Also, these users don't even know which instance to go to, since there is little to no-one to talk on there. If there are 'hundreds of thousands' of users then that means they have just recentralized on Mastodon.social, the "main" instance, defeating the point of it all.
> PS. Please do not say anything about “anyone can start his own instance”. No, average Twitter/Facebook consumer can’t start his own instance.
This is why Mastodon has failed in the first place after almost 6 years with this system.
There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.
Yes, I said: 'Little to no users'. After looking at it for a couple of years, it is not the typical twitter user that is self hosting their own Mastodon instance and just the same tech-folks that are doing that (unreliably) and sitting on Mastodon. The level of social interaction on Mastodon is so low and limited, that they still use their Twitter accounts more than their Mastodon accounts.
So yes, it is not early days anymore and we have given it enough time and it has already failed.
Having 90% of registered accounts inactive with only 10% of them actively using the platform isn't exactly 'alive', 'growing' and 'healthy' especially when they occasionally run back to Twitter since they know little social engagement goes on Mastodon. 10 is closer to 0, than 90; Hence "Little to no one".
But we both know it is not just that. Not only they can't help using Twitter more, they won't move to Mastodon for the exact same reasons as I said and Twitter's network effect, hence why little to no-one is using Mastodon. The same tech-folks like (Mastodon.technology) are the ones 'self-hosting' these instances and not the regular users, since they don't care enough to even use it.
Not even the one operating Mastodon.technology could handle it. Might as well recentralize back to Mastodon.social just to save itself from the very low levels of social interaction since Mastodon has already repeated the same problems as GNU Social once again.
That's not at all true. Account activity follows the Pareto principle. It's not at all unusual for any online service to have a large number of inactive users. Perhaps it's different for Twitter, but considering I've probably signed up for it three times and use it approximately never, I'm skeptical.
https://www.google.com/search?q=rvz+mastodon+failure+site:ht...
I wouldn't engage.
Repeating what? The truth?
Right, Please don't engage because everyone here knows it is true.
Resources donated by an organization in the form of a server linked into a larger network, a committee that vetted new server applications to the network, volunteer administrators for the network and the individual servers, coordinated regional and global upgrades. And as network users increased, reforming under a hub and spoke models to improve scale and capacity.
And when a single IRC server went away after some time operating for its various reasons, the network kept going.
Could the average IRC user start/host their own instance *and* link it to the larger network? No. But they didn't need to.
It is ok if it never gets adopted as mainstream communication. But for the target audience (like opensource support communities being the target audience of Libera), it works quite well.
In my opinion, the main reason why it was never adopted as a mainstream platform, is because it was never picked up by a big corp that saw a way to earn money off of it.
Insert any modern chat app and random user can drop a screenshot there trivally, do some basic text formatting, and paste code in nicely colored blob of text, all from comfort of single login in a browser. And now even jump to voice chat or video conference directly from it.
They can also look at what they missed in channel by just scrolling up. Sending files just worked. You just got notifications without extra fuckery. Hell, you get digest with conversations you miss.
That's why modern closed down chat ecosystems won. Coz it's easy for "normies" to use.
Let's take other example, XMPP. It had all that but in network of XEPs that some clients/servers implemented, some not, some just not very well, and some being fucky to config. It wasn't just "login here and get every feature" like it is in modern chat clients.
It had it's one shining moment where both facebook and google offered XMPP way into their garden so you could have connectivity across federation and just have a single contact list but that didn't matter to non-nerds that just used facebook/google talk so once they decided to close their gardens any benefit of xmpp faded away.
I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.
I disagree with that characterization.
> and survived
Survival is not the issue. Mastodon will survive. Tumblr survives. Even MySpace survives. But major disruptions tend to lose users.
(And yes it's true that the potential Twitter acquisition is a potential major disruption. But it's not going to be shut down after a $44 billion investment.)
As a user, I only had to point my client from Freenode to Libera (exactly one line change in my client config), run /msg nickserv register to register myself, run /msg chanserv register to register the channels I op-ed, and it was all done.
Total time spent was less than 30 minutes. The next few days, others did the same and the community started trickling in to the channels in the new servers. Seems seamless enough to me. I doubt such an easy migration is possible if Twitter disappears suddenly.
It's probably more about how much the new owners will want to drop into it and how long before it moves to x.com (?) and becomes an everything app
Why did you feel the need to mention this 100% obvious fact?
Of course I meant that the new owners wouldn't shut down something they just spent $44 billion on, thereby throwing their investment in the trash, not that Twitter would magically get a $44 billion operating cash infusion.
It was not 100% obvious what you were implying, obviously
Okthanksbye.
> It was not 100% obvious what you were implying, obviously
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Be kind. Don't be snarky.
---
I see you've edited it now to be more clear
The same people who pay for everything right now will pay for it: us. Some instances will have patreon, others will be voluntary donation, others will use some craptocurrency, others will have contractual subscriptions, some will have ads... And whatever models are best will win out. Quit with the FUD. Just sit, back, relax and watch it happen.
The official instance finding site seems to be good about spreading the load out every time Twitter burps. You have to meet certain reliability requirements to even be listed.
The whole "millions of users" fallacy is the result of people not being able to grasp what federation is about. The network can easily accommodate millions of users. Individual instances don't need to be able to.
Of course not. Mastodon instances can be capped in the first place, and anybody with a rudimentary server management knowledge can start their own instances on a cheap server. Mastodon has current hundreds of instances, let's not pretend it can't go to thousands if the user base increases.
This isn't a law of the universe, it's just software people haven't written yet. Installing new client-side apps was hard, until it wasn't. "Anyone can start their own instance" will be easy once someone writes the software to make it so. (Presumably a cloud provider like AWS, since that's who stands to profit from lots of people wanting to run server-side apps)
Who said anything about the Fediverse having to be free ?
There is absolutely no doubt that should Twitter die, if no single actor can emerge quickly enough, for-profit actors will emerge and they will have all good reasons to be compatible with something that already exists. There will be mega large instances paid by siphoning data and with ads, there will be large instances paid by users/funds/donations, there will be small, community instances. Maybe HN will have its own instance; how much do you pay for HN today ?
For a decentralized social network to be viable/sustainable (especially on the scale of something like Twitter), it has to be truly P2P, not federated on volunteer-run servers paid for through donations. That volunteer-run federated model is really only sustainable for smaller niche communities, not a global social network.
As of right now, the closest framework I can think of to handle something like this is a social network built on OrbitDB: https://github.com/orbitdb
Now first storage space taken will be ridiculous, and then you will be hosting content you don't want to host because it could be straight up illegal in your country.
Look at any crypto-blockchain and count how many full-nodes vs thin-nodes are running in networks.
Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.
There is an option of dividing it between "publisher" (source) and "cachers" (caching whatever is recent and popular) but that only helps a little bit.
> Then there is the whole tragedy of commons: average seed ratios and streaming video players for torrent content shows that are not willing to contribute to the greater good.
Over 2 decades of pirating that has only been a problem for obscure and old stuff.
I don't see it being a problem in social network sense; you publish your stuff, if there is nobody wanting to look at it, seeds 1, leeches 0. Moment there is interest it propagates. It is of course problem if you want to see something archival that author is no longer in the network tho.
The Planetary app handles this much better, but it’s only on iOS/iPadOS ( therefore also able to run on M1 MacBooks) unfortunately.
It's a common problem for old stuff like you said, very new stuff with specific formats. It's an issue for new stuff because it often doesn't have enough starting seeds, and people leaving as soon as they're done watching/downloading doesn't help the situation. Before I've discovered usenet this was a very common issue for me.
Then there is specific file formats like chunky movie rips with Dolby Vision + Dolby Atmos + Dolby Yet Another Audio Format + all of that again in 5 languages. People will often choose a different release to download, and that leads to fewer seeds.
I know a group of people on a popular torrent tracker that just downloading everything and seed forever. They do entirely for free. Those petabytes will probably rot once they...die.
The idea that social media costs more to operate than people would be willing to pay is false. It's propaganda from the people who profit from keeping you trapped in their closed networks to monetize your attention.
Server written in reasonably fast software on $10 (well, probably some extra bux in storage if community is image-heavy) VPS can reasonably serve tens of thousands of users in typical forum/blog/hn-esque format. Mastodon isn't but I don't doubt someone would rewrite it in something faster if there was a need for it.
I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.
Because Twitter is, so I think I side with the guy that said it’s silly to think it’ll shut down soon.
And if you are saying the former, then Twitter and Facebook’s longetivity should be the least of your concerns.
I personally couldn’t care less that there’s no Facebook around when I’m living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape due to the “political climate”.
Where did they move?
They might move to different Mastodon instances (via the built-in migration system) or find a new network, but they are not getting killed with no way to find each other afterwards.
At the same time, based on my own personal experience, it is absolutely impossible to get people to move to another platform or service even for the purpose of discussing future plans.
My exceedingly strong advice is to have multiple points of presence defined as a matter of course, one of which should be a simple email list (which provides persistent contact information), regardless of any awareness of an impending platform shutdown.
I agree it is difficult in the situation you describe, which is not mastodon.technology's situation.
I'd created both a subreddit (https://old.reddit.com/r/plexodus) and wiki (https://social.antefriguserat.de/index.php/Main_Page) to memorialise at least some of that discussion, as well as the on-platform discussion.
That last is of course now unobtainable, though there were over 700 snapshots of the community homepage saved to the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, see:
<https://web.archive.org/web/20190401071102/https://plus.goog...>
Because of the mechanics of both G+ and IAWBM, actually navigating to articles from that archive ... mostly does not work.
The G+ community had over 4,000 members (pretty good for late-stage G+). The subreddit ... a hair over 300.
People. Will. Not. Go. Off. Platform. Even. If. That. Completely. Fucks. Them. Over.
It's a really perverse dynamic.
vomits in my mouth a bit
Regarding spam, there is some (seemingly inevitable in any community involving humans). But frankly Mastodon, right from the beginning, focused heavily on Moderation tools. Figuratively speaking, no expense has been spared to make it easy and convenient to block bad actors (or instances) from your account (or your whole instance).
With USENET people expected to see every posts in the newsgroups they were subscribed to, and a lot of people would complain loudly if anything was missing. With a network like this nobody expects to read everything. At the same time receiving everything is easier (still) - if you federate with a couple major endpoints you get most stuff. There will be challenges with this as the network grows but I spent too much time ensuring we got messages from newsgroup X within Y hours (less was unfeasible, as there were still sites exchanging on a schedule via dialup).
With respect to spam, once you accept you're not likely to see everything, things get a lot simpler and you can apply a lot more aggressive filtering.
Personally I'm working on my own ActivityPub implementation, and one of the things I've used on Twitter in the past very effectively via the Twitter API was a simple Bayesian network used to rank things to surface interesting stuff, but lots of room to apply more sophisticated machine learning there too.
Maybe there could be a variant of NNTP which allowed some amount of advertisement posts in between. Then let the maintainers keep the proceeds from those?
Facebook and Twitter are extremely popular services, and have been at or near the top of their categories for over a decade.
Google+ was an attempt to challenge them, shut down after it failed without ever becoming anywhere near as popular.
That is the number of Google accounts that didn’t go through the effort of disconnecting from / opting out of Google+. For a few years, all new accounts were automatically enrolled in Google+. It’s likely an extremely inflated number compared to the number of users that engaged with Google+ social features.
Citation: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/01/google-doubles-plus-...
It's probably a better example of a service that never got off the ground.
Twitter and FB could survive for decades just on the their current cash positions alone.
One of the challenges of a social network, especially in a declining phase, is that there is far less commercial value being generated at the same time that various sorts of costs, including attacks on the network in both technical and social/economic senses increase. High-value members abandon the network, and those who remain are either stuck (say, because of institutional circumstances elsewhere), or are actively seeking to exploit other members.
This means that Trust & Safety costs are constantly increasing at the same time that recruiting talent to serve that role becomes increasingly difficult.
What the true cost curve looks like isn't clear, but basing your statement on a constant cost based on present experience is ... probably flawed.
This is especially true at Facebook's scale.
Despite (and in contrast to) the absolute massive marketing effort that Google put into Google+ right from launch, it never achieved mainstream success as anything other than an OAuth login tool. That doesn't mean nobody used it, but it was always niche.
It's not a proper comparison for Twitter or Facebook, which grew organically and are both mainstream successes as social networks.
It was the best social network that existed, and before it shut down it had so gotten so much right that I think no others have matched anywhere near the complete feature sets.
Having the biggest social network sucking up personal data to feed the ad network is the reality we are in. Having Google with a larger collection of personal data linking everything to a large social network would have made things worse. Google+ forced real names which made facebook force real names. Google appstore and preinstalled apps you cannot remove force location data. Google obtaining your social graph leads down a dark path.
Still, technically, Google+ was far ahead of their competition.
Their email about shuttering went into a tab in Gmail and didn't spot it, a suddenly my entire YouTube channel was deleted.
Hundreds of hours of work of crafting early videos of Elite: Dangerous and the beauty of its simulated galaxy just gone.
Luckily backed up on a NAS but I've never put them back up.
<https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1sxfar/reddit_...>
That said, Google's stated communications regarding Google+ had and have been questionable from the start. I'd had my own part in this in addressing the true size of the active community on the site, which was far below the 3--4 billion listed profiles and many hundreds of millions of active users touted. In practice, probably closer to 4--6 million true frequently actives within 30 days or so (itself not unsubstantial), and perhaps 100 million who'd been active at some point.
<https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq>
But I'd take that stated reason with a large dose of salt.
It began as a venture by a couple of graphic artists, focused on artists. It happened to have (for a few iterations) a quite clean design based on Markdown, and (with a couple of what should have been reasonably small tweaks) could have done well in the long-form text+images space (now largely owned / failed by old-school blogging engines such as Wordpress, Medium, and Substack).
The features it had, including Markdown's sections and tables was why I'd posted that particular take on G+ there. It simply presented the information better than any other readily-available platform I was using at the time.
In 2015 a bunch of trans activists and sex performers who'd been hounded off Facebook by its Real Names policy wound up on Ello, and a few people arrived from other platforms (I was at the time a refugee from G+). For about six to twelve months it was the New Hawtness, and attempted a few pivots to the space, but performed fairly poorly in doing so. My own Ello profile has a link to a set of curated posts, one section of which details various gripes and failings.
One thing Ello did do was organise as a B-Corp with a community focus. That went swimmingly until it didn't, with the first accepting VC money then being sold to a collector of such sites. The B-Corp language seems to have disappeared, along with the community principles texts. What's left is now ... a sort of vaguely art-aggregation site with an interesting history but little future so far as I can tell. It's burned virtually all its early adoptors (myself included).
Speaking of which... there's supposed to be a Mastodon Server Covenant(tm)(c)(pat. pending) in regards to such matters, but the https://joinmastodon.org/covenant where it's supposed to be documented is 404. Looks like it was quietly removed sometime after August of this year.
In any case I'll make a prediction: Mastodon will remain a haven for people too racist and/or porn-obsessed for even Twitter and Reddit to tolerate and adoption will be hampered accordingly.
I think you and I were on very different servers, and considering I've perused dozens, you must have gotten a really raw deal.
I note for the record that this is precisely the sort of thing that doomed Voat. They got invaded by racists who decamped there after being given the boot from Reddit and promptly began spamming every sub with their obnoxious behavior which chased off everyone else. They shouldn't be surprised that they have a reputation for being a haven for people too toxic even for Twitter/Reddit.
Of course not. It's on the Internet. I don't have a problem with furries, people with bias or kinks. What if I'm one of those people, should I not be allowed to make public comment?
None of the instances I've used tolerate the harmful examples such as racists or lolicons, that you've incorrectly lumped together with perfectly cromulent lifestyles, and thanks to that I've barely seen any. And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on. This happens maybe five times a year, if that.
If you do, do not be surprised when the service you're using gains a reputation accordingly.
> And on the odd occasion I do, I just ban the user or the entire instance and move on.
Yeah, that's actually part of the problem. If anyone can ban anyone for any reason then you don't actually have a federation. You have, at best, a gathering of barely-interoperable fiefdoms. You can either have a federation of commoditized servers or you can ban people you don't like -- you cannot have both.
It’s a protocol for independent systems to automatically exchange some information.
It’s not a distributed system of interchangeable instances.
Why not? A person is only banned from one instance, they are free to choose another and federate across any instances they haven’t been banned from. That sure sounds like having both federation and the ability to ban.
These are not public utilities. A person or organization doesn’t have to support someone with opposing views to them. And that’s ok. And that doesn’t break federation, except to specific instances for specific people.
Functioning federation depends entirely on good tools for users to filter and ban people and content.
That's not incompatible. You can go anywhere you want but you can get banned from place if you're an ass there is entirely sensible way for federated network to work.
More than that, it's necessary if you want any resistance to bad actors
Many instances of mastodon on the other hand are happily engaged in real meaningful moderation. The owner is expected to moderate what type of content is allowed on their instance, with the federated aspect ensuring the "free speech".
That's not to say mastodon is without issues. The issues of voat just can't be transferred wholesale.
I'm on mastodon.scholar and the most risque thing anyone has posted was a closeup of Neptune's uncensored moons. I don't disbelieve you, mastodon is part of Earth and unfortunately that means there are racists there, but I don't think your experience is typical.
The difference between the fediverse and most other online places for manyyyyyy fediverse users who use it day to day is that if a bunch of racists show up and start making things shitty then somebody (mods) will ACTUALLY do something about it whereas every other online platform just didnt really care or defend the vulnerable.
Are there large communities of racists on isolated parts of the fediverse? Sure. It is an open source software, even Trump's shitstick social network tried to steal and use mastodon.
That's what got reddit to be the biggest forum on the planet. So I guess Mastodon is worth another look then.
Then Aaron Swartz took over and made it successful until 2013.
After he was killed by the US govt the original founders came back and have been running it into the ground ever since.
So sure, Twitter will run for a long time. But it doesn't have very strong guarantees to its users about how it will treat them or what content will be allowed.
I disagree with moderation decisions made by many instances, but if they made no moderation decisions, I would not be able to use the Fediverse. So I'm glad of it, even if it's a pain sometimes.
I'm also amazed that giving users control over what they see isn't an option. That solves the problem completely by making it the user's problem. That, however, somehow never seems to be an option.
You've said this, but didn't bother to give a reason. Can't you go to church even when the plurality of people tolerate porn?
so... you never actually used Mastodon? Its users do have the ability to filter content based on keywords, accounts or domains.
Wait, where have we heard this before? Oh right, Bitcoin and mining. It won’t be run by small time users if it catches traction. Not techies goofing around on the weekend, but when your Grandma creates an account because her friend is on there.
Nah. If you can pick your king, he's not really a king. The intended recipient of your communication decided to join a server that censors your type of message.
The problem is when the federation becomes a trust, and members collude. Like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, for example. The more division, the more federation, the harder it is to collude.
C'mon. Let's call a spade as spade: you wanted to complain about moderation and you shoehorned it into conversation. In no way does it make Twitter "shut down".
He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.
I don't think it was a deliberate misquote of gp to manipulate readers. Instead, the "anytime soon" was responding to gp's exact statement of : "We'll find out soon enough."
https://www.imd.org/research-knowledge/articles/why-you-will...
Sounds close enough to "anytime soon" for me.
That may not have been what the original poster intended but if that’s the case then they should use less ambiguous language.
That said, network effect declines can happen much faster than people think, and can be hard to see in the numbers social networks usually put out. History is short on this kind of service, so precedent doesn't mean a lot.
I wouldn't put money on Facebook being around and anything like it is now in 10 years. It's barely anything like what it was ten years ago, and it's clearly not meta's priority anymore.
Twitter is tricky because Elon resuming his bid creates a wide range of possibilities, some that include him cannibalizing it out of spite. He's a wildcard here, as evidenced by him putting in the bid in the first place as something that appears to have been little more than corporate trolling. But if he takes it seriously or turns around and sells it to someone who will it could benefit from a coherent vision (even if it's one I would find very unappealing).
Source: I worked for a regionally dominant social network in the early days and watched it evaporate nearly over night.
I presume this Metaverse thing is that. Facebook may stop being the platform that serves every second person on earth a feed of images and text. Or stop being the place where we can communicate for free. Once profitability shifts to VR sets, virtual-asset markets and augmented advertising (or whatever markets emerge, if any)
That said, I think he is buying Twitter for the lulz / weird libertarian reasons, rather than making a real business out of it, and I have serious concerns it will injure what is currently a public utility absolutely beyond repair.
I can't predict what Musk will do, but I'm under the distinct impression he's trying to allow free speech for everybody, get rid of bots, improve the tech (allow editing a tweet), and potentially hold people to account better by not allowing (or deranking) anonymous accounts. There's also leaked chat with Jack Dorsey about making an open interoperable protocol. Twitter would not die if it opened it's protocol and federated. As a public company that would destroy the ability to profit, but as a private company he can do that.
I have a lot of faith in Elon based on past results. He already solved the problem of people who don't believe in climate change - he got them to buy electric cars because they are sexy. Brilliant man.
Wow that's a grim perspective. Somehow I doubt that catering to the consumerism that got us to where we are with climate change is what's going to help us fix it.
where is soon?
And also, do you have a crystal ball to predict the future?
A protocol can't die. People are still using IRC, XMPP, good ol' email, decades after they were created. They are still useful, they still work, so there is no reason for them to "die"
It has a very small community. That is very different from being dead - in fact, that community is probably much more passionate about what makes it specific than a large community.
For example, you'd find that sysadmins are much more prevalent on Gopher than Twitter.
I'd say ratio of sysadmins to actual users of the service is good indication that something is dead
But I do think it is worth pointing out there is nothing wrong with folks doing something to scratch their own itch. It does not have to be hugely popular or have a ton of users. If the sysadmins care enough to keep it running, that it literally all that matters...
I may steal this quote.
Look at email providers who suddenly decided "If you don't use it for X months, you're inactive and I'm deleting everything".
It's not about the service existing but people being able to extract and use what they've put in, in 10/20 years.
imagine the trolling potential of a rolling outage of twitter or ooops "new owner" deleted the database as a joke. Or replace all twitter profiles with sayings from Doge.
before you say "this person can't possibly do this" ... think again.
which is ... truly laughable if you like doge?
there is the mastodon project, but you can fork the code and make your own community if you want more control over your own codebase when it comes to your own mastodon instance
There's no single person on earth who can shut down Mastodon, so Mastodon dies only if this decision is made massively by many people (or if development stops, but then still nothing will stop the server I run on raspberry pi in my bedroom). Twitter otoh can be shut down by one person for a whole multitude of reasons without any concern for the opinion of users.
We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of some users having to move multiple times because the server they are no closed.
I know a fair few people who were really big Flickr fans back in the day and they lament at how the service has changed, and how its soul was diminished, because of the interests of those who now control it. You're right that it is still a going concern.
The biggest beef is everything that comes with it needing to be for-profit and how you can't control the whims of the product owner.
That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care about.
Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_defunct_social_network...
The Fediverse (or Federated Social Web as it was previously referred to in 2007 or so when it was first envisioned) will never close. Single installations may, but the network as a whole can not.
I don't necessarily hold that opinion, but I get the impression most folks I know do.
This happens all the time and there are parallels with other format / medium shifts (Gutenberg invents movable type, newspapers supplanted by news reels at the cinema -> people buy radio receivers -> broadcast television -> cable news -> whatever we have today with our always-on internet connections and services.
My main point here is that audiences are fluid, we can respect their intelligence, and they go where the content is.
It is if people who've decided it's "de facto infrastructure" get their way and the government nationalizes and regulates it. Then we're all stuck with it forever.
I'd like to see RSS come back in a big way, but replace RSS with ActivityPub and instead of nationalizing shitty centralized commercial services, adopt the protocols that allow for distributed and federated social activities.
Are we censoring Facebook now? Is this the modern version of using M$ Instead of Microsoft?
Edit: fixed quote, and learned more about hn text styling
Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.
Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example hypothetical “black swan” events?
- Multiple C-suite executives and board members get caught up in a Jeffrey Epstein level underage sex and sex trafficking ordeal. They resist when busted, and it becomes a spectacle. The evidence is just messy enough and the group is just tight-lipped enough that the legal parts of the case take a long time. In the mean time, Twitter loses users who voice their objection via not giving Twitter its attention and moves on to an up-and-coming competitor.
- The US elects a group of politicians who have authoritarian leanings (note that these could be extremists from either side of the politic spectrum, imho). This group of people lose power in legitimate elections. Via various levels of chicanery that revolve around undermining the spirit if not the law around the US election system, this group makes it so that they are able remain in power. Once they’ve started down that slippery slope, they just rewrite the laws so that they stay in power permanently. This group clamps down on free speech. The powers that be at Twitter object. A puppet leader loyal to the leading party is installed in order to manage Twitter out of existence, with a state-controlled competitor being supported in its place.
- The US is successfully overtaken in war by another country. The powers that be at Twitter allow for speech against the occupiers. Twitter is shut down.
- Twitter is found to have facilitated genocide in a foreign country (e.g., Myanmar), and the public revolts. To be honest, this will probably be overlooked, but I thought I would put it here as a thought exercise.
Part of the problem with hypothetical black swan events is that they seem entirely impossible… until they happen. That’s why they are black swan events.
I hear they have the greatest censorship. Some say the best censorship. Nobody does censorship like Twitter. Not even close.
I think we might be experiencing this just in this year with its new ownership about to occur.
People who aren't looking to make a profit (or even break even) means they are running a social media platform while funding it through some other means. What is that means of making money? What pays for the hosting and the time spent doing ops?
You can't take money out of the equation because you have hosting costs at the least.
How are things funded and why that way should be a conversation. Anything that ignores money ignores the reality of operating something on the Internet. That means it's not sustainable.
Even though funding wasn't the primary focus of this blog post, it seems to make it quite clear where the money was coming from: https://www.patreon.com/ashfurrow
Where is the line between "trying to make a profit" and "trying to be self-funding"?
Trying to be funded off of donations is really hard and rarely works. Most of the time you need other funding models.
If someone runs a biz where they run mastadon instances and the business breaks even (or just a little more) is that making a profit?
How does an organization behind an instance make money to cover expenses? This has to be looked at.
E: called them tweets
I'm understanding that the data is gone and you're bragging about the observation that the protocol still functions?
I'm not sure this is an aspect any of us care about?
I think we can all observe that a common interface for posting and interacting with people will remain and that no corporation right now can unilaterally change that. I don't think pointing that out in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone is a strength.
Oh, is that what this thread is about? Who says it is?
So is the answer that I'm misunderstanding, or is the answer that I'm understanding correctly. Are the ramifications that I highlighted true in either case, or false?
Mastodon might be able to force your followers to follow your new account, but AFAIK it doesn't do that either for reasons I don't know. That would've been cool.
> This made me realize how little joy I’ve been getting from being an admin. How I’ve come to resent the work I have volunteered to do. I’ve donated countless hours to running the instance, solving both technical and moderation problems, and I’ve always put the instance above my own needs. But I can’t put the instance above the needs of my family.
> Why Not Transfer to a New Admin?
> Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with.
The ideal inherent in federated systems- "people will use servers run by their anarchist commune's sysadmin" breaks down in real life. Nobody actually has a personal anarchist sysadmin to run their mastodon instance for them. In absence of this, the servers in federated systems are run by strangers on the internet who foolishly volunteer themselves for a huge amount of unpaid work, and who you just have to hope are going to be responsible with user's data.
This is why the anarcho-capitalist philosophy of the blockchain world has been so much more successful. The first thing they figured out was how to reward people running the servers, and how to make it so you don't have to trust them. It's a viable, expanding system, and with improvements to scalability and privacy, it will handle decentralized social media as well.
Is this all just a consequence of keeping user data private-ish? I understand the data has to be stored somewhere, and if user data were distributed to the entire network, it obviously wouldn't be private. Couldn't e2e + public key encryption be used to work around this somehow?
A major problem in distributed systems is names. one solution is to do what dns did, you can have nice names but you only get to pick them under the part of the hierarchy you control. another solution is to do what git or ipfs does. nobody gets useful names but at least you don't need any sort of central name database.
mastodon went the dns/email route, which makes sense people want nice names. but now your name is stuck on your domain. perhaps someone could have setup a central name server to avoid name collisions, but who would you trust to run it? what happens when it goes down? might as well just use dns.
Off tangent opinion on names in a federated system.
Unfortunately mastodon adopted the twitter style "@user" but because this only make sense in the context of a single domain mastodon mainly uses the awkward form "@user@domain" I think the email/xmpp form "user@domain" would have been better, but if they felt the @ prefix was critical to the experience of a twitter like micro blog than they probably should have adopted the form "@user.domain"
That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.
the question actually challenges all sorts of assumptions we make about how the internet works. in this regards it reminds me of IPFS.
And while ipfs has some very cool tech the main thing it has problems with are names. ipfs has no names, which sucks. there is a name system ipns but it does not help much.
ipfs does a publish/subscribe subsystem which I find one of the most compelling parts. it is however considered experamental and inefficient.
this did not stop me from writing a distributed video streaming system using it. which turns out to suck, no names, and, even on my local network I was getting ~ 2 minutes of lag, no one would put up with that for streaming.
https://nl1.outband.net/fossil/ipfs_stream/doc/tip/readme.md
By all means, enlighten us to the better one. It seems like they made a tradeoff here, and one that’s most in line with keeping everything distributed.
ENS (https://ens.domains/) solves this problem rather elegantly. A single source of truth that is decentralized so any app can use it without trusting anyone. It wasn't around when Mastadon was being built unfortunately but is useful for developers of new apps and protocols.
Only the top level namespaces require a purchase. Names for services (e.g. james.mastadon.eth) are free. A live example of this is Coinbase which gives users (name).cb.id for free. Once your service claims a namespace you have full control over it.
There's no central server, and not all of the instances talk to each other.
Where... where would you put the account data?
Then I saw someone do something I hadn't seen before...
They made their own mastodon insance: toot.firstlastname.example and their identity was @[email protected]
Joey could make his own toot feed of social media posts that anyone at any community could subscribe to.
Joey could then subscribe to the entire community at federatedplumbers.example, or he could follow just one user: @[email protected]. Then @[email protected] could follow @[email protected] and so on.
It doesn't matter where you start an account. You can join a community that you really like or start from scratch with your own instance and go and make friends in other communities. The real advantage with starting your own is that you have control over your content and aren't in danger of having your account shut down if a community decides it can no longer maintain the server.
There is already support for basic migration of followers but it would be nice to see fully instance-independant accounts. Probably something based on cryptography so your account is a key and you can publish from any server. However a protocol like this would be a lot more complicated than ActivityPub.
And one of the weaknesses of a decentralized model compared to a distributed one.
Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the admin(s) and move on.
You think this shows a disadvantage compared to twitter? Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will. How will your argument hold up when f*c*book finishes dying? We'll find out soon enough. Or how about when a telecoms/media conglomerate buys out flickr or tumblr and puts a stake through their heart? Oh, that already happened.
This is a bittersweet testament to exactly how the Internet should be built: on the foundations of openness, community and decentralisation.