Mastodon is crumbling – and it will only get worse | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is crumbling – and it will only get worse

sporks.space

41 pointstodsacerdoti63 comments

I don't get it. The author has an issue that one of the biggest servers hosted in Japan and used mostly by Japanese users has content that is perfectly legal and socially acceptable in Japan, but questionable in the USA? Is this a new norm on the internet? Should we all follow American legal and social conventions everywhere?

No? My understanding is that the author implies people who believe the Fediverse is a "safe" place from bigots are misguided.

I had a recent experience on a server thst seemed a fun community, until an admin took a dislike to something I said and punted me.

It was a brusque move, but, in retrospect, who needs that sort of mess?

Well, I lived in asia for a few years and that is unfortunately not an uncommon attitude from americans.

Few are loudmouths on social media, but there are more in expat social gatherings, complaining about just about everything that is different in their new host country.

Canadians however, seem to really work to fit in. Almost all I met learned the language, participated in cultural events and made local friends.

I lived and worked in SEA for about 10 years. I’m pretty sure I never went to an expat social gathering. I never understood expat communities. Primarily socializing with an insular expat social groups seemed to defeat the purpose of moving abroad to a certain extent.

I wonder if people would say the same about immigrant communities in their own country it’s basically the same thing you just get to see the other side of it.

Insular immigrant communities who take no interest in local customs, or even worse, attempt to coerce local conformance to their own customs are generally viewed as rather contemptible in every country. If you can’t adapt to the local way of doing things, then you’re simply a bad immigrant. The western identity politics view that this is somehow racist or xenophobic is anomalous and you won’t find it anywhere else in the world. I made a lot of great friends living in SEA, and met a lot of locals who were very welcoming of me. But those same people would typically (and rightfully, imo) hold a rather dim view of westerns who moved in, had no interest in learning the local language, little interest in learning local cultural customs, and little interest in participating in local communities.

I try to stay away from the expat crowds mostly because they usually did not put in much effort to be where they are. They often get sent overseas by their company, everything is arranged and they are generally (not all of them) people who have little appetite for risk but like to paint themselves as the adventurers.

they also do not mingle with locals. Even in the South of France I knew many Brits who did all their shopping at the "British groceries" store to buy "Australian wine" and they generally do not welcome non-native speakers or much preferably also Brit (note native speaker to the colonialist always means the person does not speak another second language - e.g. Indians will never be "expats" in their eyes)

Have seen many Australians, Kiwis, Canadians who actively tried to avoid that specific expat crowd, but Brits/Americans (or also Japanese) are _very_ rare to mix with locals outside their work environment.

It doesn't mean they're bad people. I have many friends who would never bother to go abroad unless it's a 5-star wellness trip isolated away from all the reality (and locals) of the country. They're just not the most interesting or adventurous people and so it's OK if they stay in their own little bubbles without bothering the rest of us imo :)

Usually if I hear my mother tongue in a foreign country I usually change to the other side of the street.

Weird. Generally the expats I know are the opposite

Keep in mind that if you're a native, or even a more "outgoing" kind of expat, you probably won't see those insular expats at all.

I'm also an expat/immigrant. I met some people who have been living here for 10 years and haven't picked up the language yet. The only reason I know about them is because they heard me speaking another language in a quick phone call and wanted a friend.

Like parent said, nothing wrong with that (plus, I'm not American, so I can't speak about the problems mentioned by the GP post)

That one only one of several points the author made. Do you not 'get' the others or are you just confused by this one point?

As I understand, some people seriously take issue with whatever is contained in that utterly useless "global" feed in Mastodon. This is basically all public posts that your instance receives. Some instances use ActivityPub relays to receive even more posts as by default an instance only receives the posts from users that have followers on said instance.

What a weird hate piece against every "bad internet archetype". So from what I gather the problems according the author are:

- The alt right

- Japanese nationalists

- "Woke" and "cancel culture", racism against white people, shitty minorities

- Gargron and the devs are "assholes" (but also "non-developers" forking the project to "cult their way" into it?)

- Mastodon users treating the fediverse like Twitter and failing to develop a culture of their own?

There is a fork called Florence that shows exactly the type of stuff you get when non-developers fork together (that's their own pun, sorry). It has been for years new and they never released any useful code, almost the way of Glimpse.

> The only two relevant pieces of Fedi software are Pleroma and Mastodon. ActivityPub is such a horrible protocol, and Mastodon has butchered it so much, it’s impossible to make an interoperable implementation without man-months of work. To reimplement Mastodon from the ground up would be a nightmare.

Interoperability through simple protocols is such an underrated property of a social network. Despite being a proprietary service, AIM's TOC protocol could be implemented from scratch in just a few hundred lines of code -- remember how many third party AIM clients there were? Even implementing the ActivityStreams system that ActivityPub is built on top of takes more code than that. From what I've seen, IPFS has the same problem -- an exciting decentralized model locked behind a nightmarishly overengineered protocol. Who is working on simpler alternatives to these systems?

> ActivityPub is such a horrible protocol, and Mastodon has butchered it so much, it’s impossible to make an interoperable implementation without man-months of work

The interesting thing is that ActivityPub's predecessor, ActivityStreams/OStatus was already butchered by Diaspora back in 2010. The other two implementations (StatusNet and Friendica) couldn't interoperate with it correctly. According to a person on their team, they never got it to work with the regular protocol so they rolled their own changes.

The other implementations were terrible as well, including the reference implementations. I believe one of the working implementation had even rolled their own crypto, making it impossible to use OpenSSL or any common library if you were writing a competitor. I only got it to interoperate with it after rolling MY own crypto, which of course was impossible to release.

ActivityPub didn't exist in 2010, and wasn't used by Diaspora, StatusNet nor Friendica.

I'm talking about the predecessor that has a similar name and originated ActivityPub. I clarified it in my edit.

I could be wrong, but I think Diaspora went for their own thing from the start (and then later considered adding OStatus support for compatibility, and then fizzled out).

And then there was the pump.io initiative, which IMHO is the more direct predecessor of ActivityPub (e.g. one of the spec editors came from maintaining pump.io)

Mastodon was luckily with being in the right place at the right time with what people wanted (or thought they wanted), both for user interest and for adoption of ActivityPub, which was being finished at the same time, and cemented a "flavor" of ActivityPub. (ActivityPub somewhat suffers from leaving too many details open, because people can't agree what's the best way of doing them)

Diaspora did use OStatus back in the early 2010s, at the height of its popularity, and it's easy to find the code in their git repository [1][2][3]. It never interoperated, of course, because it was borderline impossible to do it. Some of the OStatus code is still there after almost 10 years.

Mastodon also used OStatus before ActivityPub existed too, and this is why I'm mentioning OStatus/ActivityStreams: [4][5]

ActivityPub was an evolution of ActivityStreams/OStatus, and was started by the same people that wrote StatusNet/Identi.ca/GnuSocial and did the OStatus work in the late 2000s. It's a small group.

[1] https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/e100032244fec9de9c...

[2] https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/e100032244fec9de9c...

[3] https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/blob/e100032244fec9de9c...

[4] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8d93f0ca563322764...

[5] https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/8d93f0ca563322764...

Stupid question: Why not RSS? User publishes a text, image, video. The feed gets updated. There are already a lot of services that can make you a newsfeed from following a bunch of RSS Feeds.

PeerTube already allows me to follow a channel using RSS: https://tilvids.com/videos/watch/d8bf70c8-4de4-4110-a375-217... (Click on Subscribe -> RSS Feed)

What feature does ActivityPub have that is essential for building something like Mastodon?

The article mentions a server in Japan that has a million users. Assume they each follow 15 users, half on their own instance, half elsewhere, and that off-instance followees are followed by an average of three users. If it used RSS, that server would issue 2.5m HTTP GET requests every few minutes in order to update the feeds, even the feeds where nothing has changed. Of course it could/would use per-feed adaptive fetch frequency and use HTTP if-modified-since, but all that's only damage limitation.

This happens because RSS network activity is mostly O(users × time), not O(activity).

Just throwing ideas out there but each instance could have its "firehose" feed and ping discovery services / followed instances when there is a relevant update. Not sure if there is any benefit over just sending the update and part of the ping payload.

ActivityPub "evolved" out of ActivityStreams, which were an extension of plain Atom feeds. Basically it was an Atom feed with some extra fields.

The way we got it to work efficiently was by not using polling, but rather by using a push protocol called PubSubHubbub/WebSub that was championed by Google.

PubSubHubbub/WebSub is compatible with RSS, so it's entirely possible to do what GP is proposing.

Oh, I see. I thought the pushing was more tightly integrated than that.

Anyway, gluing PubSubHubbub to RSS doesn't seem like a meaningful improvement over gluing it to Atom. Not a simplification either.

RSS is pull only. It probably serves 80% of needs for most people ("I want to know when so-and-so has new content without manually going to the site") but ActivityPub does a bit more:

- pushes content to subscribers in real-time (doable with RSS with WebSub https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSub)

- allows content to "swim back" to the publisher: comments, replies, retweets/boost (doable with WebMentions https://www.w3.org/TR/2017/REC-webmention-20170112/)

- defines a protocol for posting to an AP-enabled endpoint (doable with micropub)

AP defines a lot of things but doesn't do it well (see https://schub.wtf/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts...), because it is not strict enough in what constitutes valid content. There are alternatives, listed above, that already do the work but they are centered towards everyone having their own server and going from site to site to post comments; the real appeal of AP solutions is that they're an all-in-one blob you connect to, and from which you do your browsing. The indieweb people (responsible for the alternatives above) have come up with "social readers" to enable this and have made a few propositions already: see https://indieweb.org/social_reader (https://aaronparecki.com/2018/03/12/17/building-an-indieweb-... in particular)

RSS can have push if it uses the same method that OStatus (ActivityPub's predecessor) did: PubSubHubbub/WebSub.

In fact, Google itself recommended doing this for a while to Atom and RSS feeds to use this tech, since they wanted to be able to consume it on their end.

Yes this is what I mentioned: WebSub moves the load from the publisher to the hub while giving subscribers their content as soon as it is published. But it's something that lives on top of RSS, and requires additional resources (especially for subscribers who need an endpoint running somewhere)

RSS is just doing an HTTP call to retrieve a XML document.

If your village is the only one where witches don't get burned, you'll end up with all the witches from the land.

If your platform is the only one without any censorship, you'll end up with all the hardcore antisemitists and similar crazies.

Like with parler, that is convenient for FBI, NSA, FSB and whoever else who needs to track the crazies. Is that a bad company fallacy? You would never believe what happens next...

Not just the three letter agency. Chances are, if it's a new company trying to create an MVP of a social network, they'll probably make mistakes like Parler did with security. Then the whole world can read the entire database and every piece of content ever uploaded, not just law enforcement.

Even though I agree with your second sentence, that 1st one has to be the front runner for Worst Possible Choice of Metaphor in a Particular Argument.

Invoking memories of literal witch hunts like Salem and the Spanish Inquisition as examples of effective community policing is ... something else.

You'll also get the people with original ideas and the people who want to change society.

The people who thought marijuana should be legal who were considered druggies, the people who thought gays should be allowed to be married despite society considering it an abomination at the time. The underground railroad type places that society doesn't condone.

In order to break dysfunctional social customs you have to be able to talk about them freely without censorship or social cooling.

And by throwing free speech forums away you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

So you're half right.

As a User of the Internet since the 1990s:

The Internet is crumbling – and it will only get worse

I've been feeling the same lately

"Usenet is dying: news at eleven" -pretty much since 1985

Before the Internet, there was Fidonet, and before that, there were mailboxes. And you know what? All that shoot that's going on today was already happening back then: Shitstorms, Bullying, Doxxing, it all happened. Only that it was a small community of nerds, with no celebrities, politicians and influencers, so all it was was a storm in a teacup, that could easily be ignored.

So when 'Social' Media appeared, I instantly knew that this was a bad idea, and never used it.

I did indeed try Mastodon a few years back, and found it to be the same pile of steaming manure that I had expected.

The solution? Except better education, I don't have one.

I keep to small communities of decent people with the same interests, and that's it for me.

I've also been using the net since the 90s, and I can confirm that it has been getting worse since then.

The author is talking about a specific corner of the internet, and specific corners of the internet have died death after death.

Everyone knows the classic examples - MySpace, Digg, Slashdot.

This post is a wonderful read, and paints a very interesting picture of diverse, tolerant and absolutely detached-from-the-norm fediverse community.

There are two really interesting paragraphs here that deserve some reflection:

1) "It actually baffles me why so much of the Mastodon userbase can be traced back to the Tumblr/Twitter leftist crowd, when Fedi’s beginnings were on a network largely consisting of ultra-right people thrown off Twitter"

2) People come in waves, and most leave again when Twitter and Tumblr rights its wrongs. I’ve seen this happen multiple times.

Those paragraphs have interesting observations on the potential and practice of competition, and what the fate of a service like Twitter will be if it upsets too many users all at once.

TL;DR; someone who joined fediverse because it was free and uncensored, complains about fediverse because it doesn't censor people whose opinions he doesn't like.

Irony is lost on the person

The title lacks punch, though. I would have used "Mastodon considered harmful". That's timeless.

Well, unfortunately, you can make everybody happy. Why join Mastodon if all you want and need is Twitter?!

I got that he was against censorship, not for it.

Not everyone on the internet is a "he".

That's why my preferred social networks nowadays are WhatsApp and Telegram groups with few members, and I know most of them in RL.

Isn’t Gab bigger than Pawoo right now?

I think Gab split from the Fediverse? I.e. it’s no longer federating with other instances.

I think it does federate, but most of the fediverse blocks it? Not sure honestly. I’m happy on Twitter

edit: yes from what I find it still federates, just all the big instances block it

edit2: oh old info. They stopped federating.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/ie49qp/is_gab_sti...

> Gab no longer supports web finger. Web finger is a critical part of federation. If you type in any username@mastodondomain(ie Gargron@mastodon.social [mastodon.social's admin] ) in the search here you will get a result: https://webfinger.net/lookup/

> But a@gab.com (Gab's admin) returns nothing.

Webfinger is a mastodon thing, not necessarily a fediverse thing. ActivityPub services can use Client to Server interactions for user discoverability.

Yes. By number of users, Gab is by far the biggest fediverse/mastodon instance. However, because people [including it seems the article author] don't agree with the views of many of their users, they pretend it doesn't exist. It's not even listed on various sites which purport to rank such things.

The irony of which seems to be lost on the creators of most of these 'alternatives', which trumpet openness and freedom from censorship. But only so long as the views you express coincide with their own.

The Fediverse is great - everybody is segregating into their little private areas. I for one can’t stand woke people and especially the leftie-commie people, and there are servers which they steer clear of.

There is absolutely no reason to subject yourself to the company of people who you disagree with.

to challenge your world views and grow as person? Yes i know some people with differing views can be arseholes but that should not stop you from putting your world views up to the test by having a discussions with the opposing side.

you can challenge your world views and grow as a person without exposing yourself to toxicity or horrible people.

I don't understand why we have to "challenge our world views and grow as a person" when it comes to social media. What if I want to just join a server to talk about old cars, or gardening or some other hobby in a casual fashion? I don't always want to see or hear about social issues or politic... and that goes for issues I agree and disagree with.

Mastodon has enabled an escape from the constant "Everything is political" and "Everything has to be about my cause" that has engulfed our culture. I think that is wonderful.

I don’t expose any information about myself online, especially to lefties, who knows what innocent remark will be cancel fodder in a week or two. I don’t need to be wheedled or badgered for not being aware of the latest trend, or for bucking it. For example, I don’t do pronouns. I don’t care what people want to be called, it’s an imposition on me. This right here is enough to get you added to the list at Google, for example.

Is this sarcasm? It's difficult to tell sometimes...

But one good reason for having discussions with people you disagree with is that you get to see things from a different perspective and maybe learn something too.

Depends what you're disagreeing about and whether all parties want to have a discussion in good faith, which seems to be in shorter supply these days.

Otherwise we just stay in our bubbles and enjoy the echo?

I’d prefer not. I can get information on all the newest trends and thinks by opening any one of the now nearly identically policed social media sites, news aggregators, and video sharing sites, if I wish. But I don’t wish.

I'm never going to get tired of posting it this codec call from the end of MGS2:

"In the current, digitized world, trivial information is accumulating every second, preserved in all its triteness. Never fading, always accessible. Rumors about petty issues, misinterpretations, slander. All this junk data preserved in an unfiltered state, growing at an alarming rate. It will only slow down social progress, reduce the rate of evolution. The digital society furthers human flaws, and selectively rewards development of half-truths." "Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right. Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth." And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper."

Not that it's 100% applicable. But it's interesting to see this from a game released in the year 2001.

Are people just worse than they used to be on average?

No, people are the same as they’ve always been, on average.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com