There’s also an open and active GitHub issue on mastodon discussing how to separate server hosting from domain name so you can point DNS at an existing instance and use it from that domain: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/2668
Many thanks to my friend on twitter for pointing me to both of these: https://twitter.com/__jesse_li/status/1592006641897320448
>Mastodon by Teams (tm), please log in with your active directory credentials to see the latest posts from HR!
APIs are not protected by copyright.
Everyone always just starts a group chat instead, as the reply is always so small and hidden, and the card system makes it hard to manage more than one or two threads at a time.
Yes, and still nobody uses it
The comms team religiously using it, and the ‘what’s happening’ digest being on by default meaning posts are surfaced in to people’s inboxes regularly until they unsubscribe means everyone knows about it.
Eve Online fans literally cheer Microsoft Excel features at annual Fanfest - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022/05/eve-onlines-ms-excel-... /// https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31292593
So this has only gotten weirder recently. Microsoft decided to rename Yammer when inside of Teams to Viva Engage. Nothing about this branding decision makes sense. It's still Yammer if you open a link to the web version. It's still Yammer.com if you want to go to the public web version. It's just called Viva Engage inside of Teams and now Outlook. (To use an ancient dumb aphorism, apparently it is now called Yammer in the streets and Viva Engage in the sheets.)
On top of different brand name (for the same app!) there's also a different UI design. It's almost the most confusing you could possibly make it.
Whoever is at Microsoft in charge of these marketing decisions has either lost their mind or this is some sort of long con that doesn't make sense yet. (There's hints that Microsoft is trying to rename Cortana to Viva, and they did rename what used to be Cortana Insights emails to Viva Insights, all of which are also dumb brand names. This seems an effort play up that these various inside-Teams and inside-Outlook sub-services are some sort of "intelligent business assistant for business users only" to jettison the final remaining ties to consumer Cortana [RIP] and the fun gaming-originated name for something bland and soulless and not-fun capital-E Enterprise, sigh.)
Anecdotally, the rebrand so far seems to be diminishing use of Yammer inside of Teams at my employer. They had Yammer as a default app in the default sidebar of Teams but when the branding switched Viva Engage is no longer in the default list. There's still something of a "well, post it on Yammer" culture here and people don't even seem to realize they can do it directly in Teams anymore because Teams no longer has a "Yammer app" and no one knows to look for "Viva Engage".
This is all just really wild and feels a bit like Microsoft has lost some of its mind here.
The language makes a huge difference as you need to deploy the whole Ruby toolchain, and front it with all the hard choices Rubyists had to deal with for ages to make it kinda work! You don't make a distributed competitor of Twitter following its own wrong design chocies!
Mastodon is old, and it's a shaky foundation, and it should be rebuilt from scratch instead of disappointing the millions of people who suddenly like Dorsey more than Musk... although Dorsey is working on Bluesky, not Mastodon, or ActivityPub!
Might I suggest you take a deep breath and tell yourself ‘it’s ok, I don’t need to pick fights with random people over trivial things’?
> The language makes a huge difference
If a decentralized social network is a good thing (jury is out imho), guess it’s a good thing that there’s ActivityPub implementations in multiple wildly different languages then?
ANyway, just try to imagine the same spammy bots taking down all Mastodon servers when the super eager to leave Twitter move to the next cool thing... It won't be pretty! The Fail Whale will feel like a joke compared to what's about to come.
> How was Twitter any better before him?!
Before Musk took over it wasn't saddled with the $13B in debt he took on to buy it. Before Musk took over advertisers weren't fleeing the platform in droves. Before Musk took over no one could impersonate Eli Lilly with a blue checkmark and cause its stock to crash. There's no indication now that Twitter will do anything to stop hate campaigns and abuse when they arise (hate speech is free speech, after all, and isn't illegal in the US). I could imagine some kind of future for Twitter before Musk, but that's immensely more difficult now.
I don't think Mastodon is the solution, mind you. But it's no surprise to me that a lot of folks are looking for an alternative.
But presumably because very few people cares about that benchmark and what is supported depends on what they choose to add. You're the first person I've ever seen mention it.
For a simple reason: Performance on dynamic requests is a choke point only for a miniscule proportion of sites, and the federation that is a selling point for Mastodon ensures that any single Mastodon instance is far less likely to ever approach a size where that becomes an issue. There are certainly sites where I wouldn't run Ruby, even though it's a language I love to use.
But I'll repeat myself: The choice of Ruby is far down the list of issues with Mastodon.
Returning to the benchmark, it's also contrived to reference as a general measure for a web app. Anyone building actual systems using Ruby puts Ruby behind a reverse proxy exactly because we're fully aware you focus on avoiding hitting the Ruby app server for anything static or cacheable, and so the setups on that benchmark (there are at least four frameworks and a couple of dozen entries) are entirely atypical for Ruby app server setups (they all hit the web server hosting the Ruby app directly).
That's fine - they measure what they measure, but they don't measure a realistic web app setup with any relevance to Mastodon.
E.g. the vast majority of traffic for a Mastodon instance is read-only requests to toots and media that are trivially statically cached, and so the vast majority of hits to a Mastodon server set up to actually scale should never hit the app server at all.
I have a deep distaste for Rails, and think Mastodon is more complex than it needs to, and there's plenty to criticise Mastodon for, but you're barking up the wrong tree.
For any software that embodies an open and formally-specified protocol (in this case, the protocol is ActivityPub), any first implementation of it is a reference implementation (as opposed to a defining implementation), because at any point someone else can create another implementation, and then both implementations will have to deal with adhering to the standard, rather than either being able to bully the other into implementing things a certain way. It's not about whether anyone else has implemented a second client for the standard; it's just about whether they can, and what would happen if they did.
Examples of things that are reference implementations of open protocols/formats, where the protocol/format "came from" the reference implementation but then became its own thing, with other implementations: Memcached, Redis, IPFS; PNG, OpenDocument.
Example of something that's not a "reference implementation of an open protocol", despite seeming like it: Amazon S3. There are many other "S3-compatible" servers; but there's no open, formalized standard for what "S3 compatibility" means; and so Amazon can change S3's API at any time, and everyone else will just have to deal with that. (They won't — it's been the same stable API forever — but they could. And what they can do is the point here.)
Key to remember is yet. The internet started as DARPAnet, after all.
What's old is new again!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezboard [1]
And later,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VBulletin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invision_Community
[1] I'm upset that archive.org can't display any of this content due to the robots.txt of one of the later owners of the domain name.
All of this also coincides with a massive migration to Mastodon v4 adding to current maintenance burdens.
So the short answer is: masto.host probably will open its doors again if it doesn't seem to be hosting too much of the Fediverse, and it will probably be at least a few more days if not a few more weeks before registrations open back up if they do.
(There are some alternative hosts to consider if you don't want to wait on masto.host.)
Finding a mastodon instance is a pain today. And "run your own" is not a great option. (It's a pain to run your own publicly accessible anything, these days. I will never go back to running my own email server ever again)
I have only heard the best about masto.host but they have closed subscriptions for now (which only speaks for them IMHO). I have personal experience with Ossrox and Weingärtner IT, they are both excellent and I can recommend them without hesitation. I have no affiliation with any of those companies except being a customer of the later two.
EDIT: The price of a small instance is less than a Twitter subscription. So, if you want your own instance - which as pros and cons - nothing is holding you back.
Who was, by the way, an homage to Vint Cerf, creator of TCP/IP.
While the verification green check mark is nice, it is much better to have PR hosted on toot.company.com instead.
Furthermore, there's the "who can see what" - https://restoreprivacy.com/mastodon-privacy-issues-risks/
> Because these messages aren’t end-to-end encrypted, the server owner can read everything in plaintext.
(See also https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/18079 )
That's a BIG "companies should be hosting their own servers."
But does this really address that issue? I see this as an attack vector really. Let's say Elon isn't happy with the competition. He can join a small server and force them to either increase hosting fees or to shut down. That's really the point of the author's comment and the relationship to scaling.
Please correct my misunderstanding.
This is perhaps my biggest regret. I've ignored Mastodon because it seem too much like a PITA to deal with. Now I've been looking at it more seriously, but so has everybody else who's on Twitter, so by the time I get there it's going to be... Twitter pre Musk. This isn't really that appealing. Coulda woulda shoulda, etc., but I just wasn't paying enough attention at the right time. Rather like Bitcoin. Don't get me started.
Mastodon doesn't need to be Twitter where you "must" follow celebrities of any sort or streamers/podcasters/YouTubers/Influencers. People claiming that Mastodon is terrible because it isn't focused solely on massive instances with maximal "reach" are missing the point: that is a *feature* and not a bug. People have forgotten the early days of Twitter when it was mostly about following real life friends, or conference acquaintances. There's a usefulness to quieter, stiller social media. It's great to have tiny instances with tiny follow streams.
Also, on Mastodon you will only see what you explicitly follow. You won't even see the rabble unless you go looking for it.
It's not like torrents and likes of PirateBay that make downloading movies easy. It's very complex to get into the network. It's like Mastodon is trying to not let you in.
Not really. Email and ActivityPub are radically different in one way that makes all the difference: AP is whitelist-based (follows).
> Federate with our servers and we’ll pay you 1c for every message you allow us to post to your users...
And this is a fine model - much better than all the power concentrated in one stagnant entity that forbids everyone else from participating, extending or improving.
So now your user's incoming follow request inbox is a list of viagra ads, .eth scams, and pornstars.
I'm saying that in terms of economic "bang for the buck", if you were going to spam the fediverse doing it with follow requests is a terrible way to do it with very low likelihood of success. You are better off trying for other means of virally distributing toots than follow request spam.
Also, federation itself may be allowlist-based. Some instances already run that way. Likely many more would if inter-instance spam follow requests rose above a certain threshold.
I'm not thats anywhere near the disruptiveness of SMTP. As a private person, I could simply have the server not notify me of any follows and it wouldn't affect my own feed at all.
The two smartest people in this business are Yishan Wong and Ellen Pao.
Just spitballing ... offer a generous severance for voluntary layoffs now along with a hiring freeze, and give a mandate to simplify the offering and reduce infrastructure costs. Take the time to learn the business and identify which areas can be profitably wound down. Only then reorganize the company and make targeted layoffs. (Bonus idea: don't rush features like Twitter Blue that no one asked for, are ripe for abuse, and might even lose money overall if reports are correct.)
I've never been a huge Musk fan, but any respect I had for him as an effective business leader has evaporated.
What's the problem there, if you know all your users have corporate-mandated spam-blockers installed that will drop the spam they're paying you to forward?
Wil joined what was at the time my own home instance, following something of a flameout on Twitter, itself caused by 1) people harassing him there, 2) Wil employing a shared, user-generated blocklist which 3) by both its own size and celeb-driven adoption rendered many other Twitter accounts effectively blocked --- not by Twitter, but as a result of individual adoptions of that blocklist. How legitimate inclusions were, and/or how feasible it was to get off the blocklist, I really can't say. That said, Wil arrived on Mastodon with both a large fan and foe base.
Harassment of Wil began on Mastodon.
<https://www.theglobaldispatch.com/mastadon-shuts-down-wil-wh...>
The admin/moderator was ... less than transparent or capable, and responded to a case of "this profile is causing me problems" by banning that profile rather than seeking out the root cause of the griefers who'd in fact triggered the problem.
<https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251>
Ultimate, Wil left Mastodon as well, writing his own account of the matter:
<https://wilwheaton.net/2018/08/the-world-is-a-terrible-place...>
Mastodon's evolved its own tools and practices (both technically and as a community, including a community of admins), and should perform better in future, though much engineering progress emerges through pain, suffering, or worse.
Wil is, in the world of celebrity, fairly modest stakes. I've heard tales of Twitter that there was a point where it could only handle a tweet from one major celeb (e.g., Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, or one of the 'dashians) at a time, and effectively had servers dedicated to sufficiently large accounts. Celebrities proved an interesting stress-testing mechanism.
Mastodon ... has not yet experienced this, and I've my concerns with how well it might handle such scaling, or what specific elements of scaling (users, instances, posts, interactions, ...) will prove most problematic. I've certainly seen and heard of numerous cases of growing pains over the past few weeks, though nothing insurmountable.
But:
1. Celebs and brands are profile types that should be considered.
2. Mastodon's had some experience and performed poorly, both technically and culturally.
3. Adding very-high-profile profiles to the network needs some consideration. It's quite likely that there will be poorly-thought-through adoptions in future, however.
... but then a bunch of guys in stormtrooper outfits start showing up every day and the trekkies start fighting with them and the cops are getting called out and pretty much eventually the owner is going to ask Mr. Wheaton to stop coming by.
And because it's just someone else's café, he pretty much has to do that.
The good news is, going to that café is not the only way for him to participate in the fediverse. He is the proud owner and operator of wilwheaton.net, and he can point that at his own activitypub server, that nobody can kick him off. He can bulk block all stormtroopers, interact with the trekkies in the café, and handle his own bandwidth and compute bills for delivering his content to all his fans.
Bonus: the fact he's posting from @[email protected] acts as a pretty solid cast iron guarantee of authenticity, that you are dealing with the one and only actual Wil Wheaton.
Meanwhile, Stephen King is sat at the café down the road trying to figure out why the new owner there wants him to pay him $8 a month to have the owner keep telling people who walk in 'yep, that's the real Stephen King over there'.
I've been on Mastodon since 2016. I enjoy and appreciate it. I admire the goals.
But much of the "it's intrinsically better / safe / scalable" talk seems based on little more than hope and faith, rather than evidence and engineering.
And given the Fediverse's own protocols, operating out of MyCafe rather than SafeCafe or BigCafe ... only provides modest additional protections. Yes, it helps assert identity more effectively (as I've previously noted: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33512169>), but it only solves a small portion of the abuse, trust, and safety concerns. Mechanisms simply are not yet sufficiently robust for a large-scale (100m -- billions of MAU) social network.
Some of that will come in time, though I've concerns that there are weaknesses that have already been baked into the underlying architecture and assumptions.
To my understanding, there were further complicating factors involved beyond just "scaling":
- At the time I heard that the mastodon.cloud instance admins and moderators spoke English as a second language (it was started to primarily focus on Japanese Mastodon, to my understanding), which added an accidental language barrier to the challenge of moderating that many reports (and being able to seek out a "root cause of the griefers")
- I still don't know how to make sense of the whole counter.social thing and Wil's supposed involvement there (which happened before the mastodon.cloud incident). I think it was partly a scam that accidentally honey trapped Wil with very bad timing, but he doesn't refer to it directly in his own account, only obliquely, so I don't think we know an answer for sure. (Only what I observed in federated Meta drama from a tiny instance at the time.) But to my understanding it still relates to some of the root causes of some of the grievances. (counter.social is a now entirely defederated instance with alt-Right associations and markets itself as "safe" and "secure" and "celebrity friendly" and "InfoSec focused" and is run by an admin referred to most commonly as "The Jester", seemingly somewhat in homage to/love for Batman's nemesis The Joker.) I can't imagine knowing the full facts ahead of time that Wil would have ever chosen to associate with that sort of instance on purpose, but I can understand (some) of why once accidentally associated with that sort of instance it caused some lasting grievances.
My understanding is that Mastodon.cloud's admin was a native German speaker. The instance was subsequently purchased by a Japanese firm. (I left during this process due both to dissatisfaction with the WW incident and lack of clarity on the transfer.)
WW had nothing to do with CounterSocial AFAIU. As the link I'd provided above shows, he'd been on mastodon.cloud at the time: <https://mastodon.cloud/@wilw/100635779449174251>
That said, I'm frankly not familiar w/ CounterSocial, though it appears to be a Mastodon fork:
- counter.social's admin "The Jester" was the "InfoSec expert to the stars" that was behind at least one of the post-GamerGate blocklists for the safety of celebrities that Wil had been recommending to other celebrities and because of that Wil had some sort of (para)social relationship with The Jester, at least on Twitter.
- In 2017 (nearly a full year before the mastodon.cloud incident), The Jester allegedly convinced Wil to join counter.social (or deeply faked an account for him on counter.social). [1]
- That @[email protected] account went viral on Mastodon among instance admins because up until that point counter.social was only a weakly federated instance few were familiar with/"no one had heard of".
- counter.social going viral brought a lot of scrutiny on counter.social. It was quickly found to be full of accounts of transphobes and racists and worse.
- This lead to a public re-examining of The Jester's Twitter blocklists. Those blocklists were found to be themselves biased towards transphobia and subsequently celebrities were asked to disassociate with The Jester and stop using his blocklists.
- Most Mastodon instance admins I trusted blocked/defederated from counter.social in the middle of these events in 2017. (For what it was worth, I made the same decision and also blocked it.)
- I still don't think this association with counter.social was intentional by Wil. This part is mostly my speculation: It sounded like "InfoSec expert to the stars" The Jester had been trying to get any celebrity to take the bait to join Mastodon via his instance and it was a bit of an intentional honey pot trap from someone who had built up a "trustworthy" reputation on Twitter taking advantage of the consequences of GamerGate to build that reputation and only with hindsight seems to have been doing that "for the lols" and was pro-GamerGate while pretending to be anti-. (That era GamerGate of Twitter was a different time and wilder place. Hard to imagine people not having immediate paranoid reactions to someone calling themselves "The Jester" today, but hindsight is 20/20 and easy to armchair quarterback when not in the middle of the stress of it all.)
[1] The best receipt I have found so far is mastodon.social's ancient copy of the account profile and 2017 pinned intro post: https://mastodon.social/@[email protected] (this is also what I saw on my own instance at the time and matches what my instance still shows; I don't trust counter.social enough to see if permalinks track all the way back into that instance's own slimy history.)
(ETA: Also, sadly counter.social has been in the Mastodon news again lately because new people in this massive wave of Twitter users looking for a Twitter alternative have been duped into thinking counter.social is a "safe" alternative to Twitter and not a Gab-like haven for trolls.)
Isn’t that a protection racket?
The point of mastodon is not that big companies will join small volunteer-run instances. They can run their own mastodon servers, just like they run their own mail servers and chat servers (or, more accurately, they outsource running their own mail and chat servers to Google and slack).
The right place for ActivityPub to land is that businesses and institutions will host their own (or pay a SaaS offering to do it for them, like they do with email and their CMS today), individuals will sign up to shared services (like you sign up with gmail for email, or blogger.com to blog).
The problem is going to be holding the barbarians at bay. All the same stuff we have to do for email will need to be deployed: Community blocklists for misbehaving servers, IP reputation, ML spam detection…
And funding it will require cash which the adtech industry will spiral in and offer to provide. ‘Federate with our servers and we’ll pay you 1c for every message you allow us to post to your users…’ Server admins will resist for a while but eventually, the walls will crack.
Enjoy it while it lasts, this burst of old school volunteer-run internet. It won’t survive this eternal September. It never does. As the architect of the Matrix said: Denial is the most predictable of all human responses. But, rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have destroyed it, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it