Mastodon.technology Shutdown | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon.technology Shutdown

ashfurrow.com

630 pointsfreosam584 comments

This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move.

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.

Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable.

I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.

Let’s use Google+ as an example. It did shut down and still not all wounds have healed yet. For example, the indie RPG scene laments its demise.

Edit: A Reddit thread as citation https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/udegsl/does_anyone_hav...

Mastodon will probably die first because it's just a software but that's not a problem: ActivityPub, the protocol, and the Fediverse, the network, will most certainly outlast Twitter. Unless Twitter chooses to get compatible with the Fediverse.

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"

>but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable.

He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.

I find the idea that X won't / can't happen on a 3 month timeline, in this political climate, silly. Is there such a thing as stability bias? Because folks had best recalibrate their expectations for rate of change, starting a few months ago. I won't be taking any bets on Facebook, but the thing I'm replying to sounds like 6-months ago thinking.

Once the twitter sale is completed, the new owner of twitter can chose whatever they want to do with it, including shutting it down - which in this milleu would be something that the buyer of twitter will consider doing just for LOL's.

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.

That’s true of Facebook, but I can see Twitter receiving a fatal blow if the Musk acquisition goes through.

f*c*book has been floundering for some years now and is lurching from trying to follow one trend to the next, pouring money into each attempt and everything twitter seems to do causes another exodus. They'll be brought out and then hollowed out, or attempt a major pivot which will be fatal for their global relevance. This is without the spectre of data protection laws offering us more and more protection from the abuse of these sorts of platforms, having themselves broken up by monopolies, their revenue stream being cut off wholesale by the likes of Apple, investors and big customers finally realising they're paying for bots and I'm sure several other bear traps just waiting for them to stumble into.

These services may not "shut down" but they might change (or have already changed) so much that many would not have signed up knowing what they know now. This is kind of a danger of an open protocol too (for example, IRC users who signed up in 1998 to talk about Britney Spears gossip are probably not well-served by most current IRC networks), but not to the same extent.

try opening any myspace/google+/orkut/and so on links and you can see this in action.

Orkut was super successful and was eventually shutdown.. Meta will live on forever but facebook might well be a relic of the past. Most people don't even log into facebook anymore than a few times a year.

I wouldn't claim Twitter will shut down soon, but one could argue that mastodon is more robust because it's divirsified.

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.

In some sense of the word they are already shut down. Moderation is very heavy on both and certain topics just can't become widely shared. For example, a recent thread by a sex worker had something like 8/30 tweets censored off the platform (despite none of the content being graphic, offensive, or illegal).

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.

OP didn't say anything about timing. Everything comes to an end. The point is that the timing in one case is decided by the users, the other by shareholders.

You don't know when they will simply decide not to give you access to certain data.

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.

I don't think he was saying either Facebook or Twitter is going to close soon. Heck, MySpace is still around. But sooner or later, centralised systems either shut down or become something completely different: think about Tumblr as a good example of that.

> but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable.

where is soon?

And also, do you have a crystal ball to predict the future?

Google Reader T_T

Where is your myspace page?

I'll just butt in at this point to note that 'federated' systems are more or less FidoNet and Usenet warmed over, neither of which managed to overtake commercial systems, and in the latter case was rendered useless by spam... much like Mastodon and friends which are rendered useless by racism and porn.

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.

Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on? This has always confused me and is part of the reason I haven't started using it, I couldn't decide on which instance to use. Why can't an account be globally unique and not tied to a specific instance? Why, as a user, do I have to deal with the low-level concept of an instance?

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?

Mastodon confused me for the longest time as well. Which community do I join? If I create an account on "federatedplumbers.example" why would I interact with a community and follow people at "federatedshoelacecollectionists.example"? Shouldn't I create an account at both communities and interact with each separately? This is what we do now by having a twitter account and a facebook acount, and a etc... A twitter account doesn't ever talk to a facebook account.

Then I saw someone do something I hadn't seen before...

They made their own mastodon insance: toot.firstlastname.example and their identity was @joey@toot.firstlastname.example

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: @phoebe@federatedplumbers.example. Then @monica@federatedshoelacecollectionists.example could follow @joey@firstlastname.example 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.

because that is your identity, the full "user@domain" the domain you are on is an intrinsic part of addressing to get to your account. so the question then becomes why can't you change your name? and it has mainly to do with avoiding name conflicts in administratively isolated systems.

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"

> because that is your identity

That seems like a very, very poor choice. I have the same concern with Matrix.

It is actually a better question than I initially thought.

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

> That seems like a very, very poor choice.

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.

I don't know that I'd agree that it's a "very, very poor choice" but I can see how it would prevent Mastodon from seeing more widespread adoption. If widespread adoption isn't their goal, then it really doesn't matter though, and as you said, they made a tradeoff. I can definitely see the benefits of both ways of handling users.

>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.

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.

no it doesn't. and you'd have to pay for names, which disqualifies it for mastodon like usage from the start.

Can you elaborate on how it doesn't? It ticks all of the boxes from your message.

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.

From a technical point of view because ActivityPub is based in HTTP and other instances need to know what endpoint to talk to.

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.

It's because of the sybil problem. If accounts are globally unique, then a bad actor can register as many accounts as they want, and can do things like e.g. reserve other people's usernames and charge real money to have them unreserved.

> Can someone explain why a Mastodon account is so intrinsically tied to the instance it was registered on?

There's no central server, and not all of the instances talk to each other.

Where... where would you put the account data?

There's a way to do this, but it requires fat clients https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Ya'll are describing SSB protocol and ManyVerse.

I just looked into SSB and I really like the concept. It seems much more elegant than Mastodon. Why is Mastodon/the Fediverse so much more popular (or is it?)? What are the advantages of federation over total decentralization? I suppose one disadvantage of total decentralization is the need for ‘fat clients’, as another commenter pointed out.

As you can see with Twitter, more popular doesn't mean better.

I imagine it working similarly to IPFS, where the data is distributed across the network.

Think of it as more like email. You have an account on a specific server, but can send or receive emails from anyone on any server.

There's not one network with mastodon. Depending on which node you start in, you can get different graphs (from what I remember, mostly due to differences in value between valuing free speech vs preventing hate speech).

And who will pay for that openness and decentralization? Let’s hypothetically say that Twitter is closed, millions of users discover Mastodon and move. Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this? By volunteers adding more instances(that they can close anytime)? This will not change anything. Everything cost money and living in an “free” world bubble isn’t helping in any project adoption.

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.

Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were run?

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.

As a daily IRC user I can say this: IRC never was reliable. Constant attacks, splits, nick squatting or other crap ware pain in the ass. That’s why it never was adopted as a mainstream communication platform, and at its peak it had maybe 400k+ users. Now most of that are bots and stale sessions.

I am a daily IRC user and I think you are exaggerating the problems. I can count on my one hand the number of times I have seen an attack on my nick or the channels I hang out in, in the last 15 years. Those attacks pass without much disruption (sometimes requiring staffer intervention). Nick squatting is solved by Nickserv these days. Splits do happen occasionally but they resolve on their own automatically without much disruption.

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.

As a daily IRC user: IRC was never reliable, but it persists still. A distributed system is easier to hurt but far harder to destroy.

in the last 20 years I have had more attacks on my email account and $whatever_current_social_network account then I had on my irc account. Things like nickserv and ip cloaks (which have been part of nearly all networks I used to connect to and those I connect to) do the job just fine. Is it easy to flood down a server, sure is, but if there's more then 1 hub on the network, things will settle pretty quickly normally.

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.

I don't think we can just assume that "reliable" is a globally agreed property to judge alternatives. That property is something that came about and on some level spoiled users. Because for commercial social network providers any downtime meant a loss of users, eyeballs, and most importantly money.

Uh, no, it was always usability.

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.

> Did Web 2.0 make us all forget how open IRC networks were run?

I haven't forgotten about the Freenode hostile takeover.

And yet a large number of channels and a large number of communities migrated seamlessly to Libera and survived.

Except that the freenode takeover didn't really have much to do with IRC as such. It had to do with a domain name theft.

Besides the other comments, was this anywhere near the same scale?

Pay for what? It's not about making money.

> 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.

> "That they can close anytime", just like twitter in this example. Partly, yes.

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.

> Pay for what? It's not about making money.

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.

This right here. He's right you know. Everyone knows that Mastodon can't handle this amount of users and after 6 years, it's enough to see that by itself it has failed, (unless you count Truth Social as a great example of a Mastodon usage that has more users than Mastodon itself in less than a year)

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.

> For servers that run Mastodon.

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.

> 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 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)

Anyone can just pay $6/month to the good folks at masto.host to manage one for them. It's enough for them and possibly a few friends. I don't know if there are any other managed Mastodon companies, but this one has been around for years and has a good reputation. Their managed instances also meet the joinmastodon.org listing requirements by default.

Who pays for Twitter ?

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 ?

As a counter example, email is a federated system too. I don't think a federated network should, or can for that matter, mimic the user friendliness of a closed system; so there won't be massive exodus of users from Twitter to the federverse, no matter how screwed Twitter became.

Our pay-what-you-can cooperative Mastodon instance at social.coop, running strong for over 5 years, is currently debating what to do with our 10,000€ budget surplus.

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.

Well, it was true decade, maybe two ago. Stuff got faster and therefore cheaper too.

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.

> Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds.

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.

I think the problem is exactly that the average consumer can't start their own instance. What if there was a front-end service that made creating a fediverse instance as easy as creating a discord or Slack, and handled all the messy technical stuff with setting up an instance for the average user, while at the same time allowing said user to have full control of the cloud files? The front end would be incredibly light weight (just API calls, no data storage), so even if it shut down, as long as it is open source someone else could run their own instance of it on a different URL and the user could keep admin of their instance through that.

Admins of existing instances can configure user limits, close registration, etc., so new user will move to other instances or create demand for commercial instances.

> Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds. How do you approach this?

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.

Simple: It collapses and the millions move on to the next one, leaving the collapsed server to catch up and come back online. Like a scared but surviving turtle. Most servers are crowdfunded. Even the project's instances get funding through Patreon.

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.

Is there anything to prevent a person/group from setting up a Mastadon instance with a charge to cover hosting, admin, & support costs (something like businesses charging for service on Open Source software support)? This could both make it more stable and sustainable and be a barrier to bots/trolls.

Nope - Mastodon supports invite-only which can aid in this sort of set-up; I'm sure other platforms do as well. And if one runs a close-knit community (which takes more than expertise and infrastructure), donations or something like a Patreon scheme can work.

Musk suggested that for Twitter and responses were not positive at all.

This is why I view the "federated" form of decentralization to be more of an intermediate stop-gap between fully centralized and fully decentralized in the form of true P2P.

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

Fully p2p doesn't really work well either. For a fully p2p network, nodes will have to hold the entire data.

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.

Yeah, and there will be people that will just throw their porn collection there, hogging space on other people's drives for no good reason.

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.

> Over 2 decades of pirating that has only been a problem for obscure and old stuff.

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.

All fair/valid points to consider. The closest example so far that I've found of a truly P2P online community is Aether: https://getaether.net

edit: Scratch that, a more fleshed out and popular protocol that implements this P2P concept is Scuttlebutt: www.http://scuttlebutt.nz/ The most user friendly and refined client I’ve found that implements this protocol is Planetary: https://www.planetary.social/

I am not participant but I have seen some invite only fediverse instances. Can't there be paid instances too, even pay by (please don't hate me here) watching ads ? Does actually anyone need to cater to millions of users?

Absolutely. In Mastodon it's a pretty simply setting IIRC and I expect it's commonplace across other microblogging platforms that use ActivityPub. I certainly wouldn't be against the principle of joining an instance that was paid for.

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.

Mastodon.Social has a Patreon page. Quite a few supporters. Obviously Wikipedia, NPR etc are a model.

> Mastodon instances will be down in matter of seconds

what, why? The load is hardly that high.

When the Musk takeover was first announced it was practically impossible to register on many of the most popular Mastodon instances.

An actual takeover will almost certainly be a virtual DDoS on Mastodon.

For reference, based on quick Googling, Twitter publishes around 10 000 tweets per second on average.

i.e. my laptop could handle the write load. A retired nerd with a real server they put in a data center for bandwidth could easily run that level of traffic on 2022 hardware.

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 10-100 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 and advertising stuff to monetize it/just wanted to provide the service.

On average I guess that makes sense. The peaks must be ridiculously high though.

Yes, hosting is a cost and it is not 'free', hence the frequent downtime with Mastodon instances, even when they had traffic during Elon's takeover of Twitter many of then could not even handle the new users.

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.

Six years of steady growth is a Silicon Valley failure. It is not a failure by any reasonable measure. I predicted back in the early days that Mastodon would grow slowly and organically as more people figured it out and helped people in their circles come over. It's slow and steady, but I was right. This is how things grew before anything less than a double-digit billion sale to one of the big tech companies was seen as a failure.

I look at all of the interests and discussions and shitposts that are on my home and local feeds, watch the interactions between mutuals and people argue, learn, laugh and join in shared hobbies and simply cannot fathom how this can be "failed". All this and if I turned off my anti-virus I wouldn't see any adverts and am never subjected to abusive interests or dark patterns. How is this failure? It's what I want from the Internet. It's real, actual people.

Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here? Do you have some kind of personal issue with the protocol?

There are plenty of people using it. It has not “failed”.

> Weren’t you complaining about mastodon having “no users” in the last big discussion about it here?

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.

I'm following so many accounts that if I don't sign in for three or four days I can barely keep up with my home feed. Almost all of it is interesting, funny, insightful or simply chill discussion. They almost exclusively use the Fediverse, none of them use the Fedi as a second-class citizen. Your insistence that something that is alive, growing and healthy has "failed" is simply proof that you have failed to bother with it because of your preconceptions.

What exactly has Mastadon failed to do?

> Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will.

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[0] or so when it was first envisioned) will never close. Single installations may, but the network as a whole can not.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/2760660/Towards_a_Free_Federated_So...

Wouldn't the answer for most people to "What happens when Twitter shuts down?" be, "Well I'll just move to the next social media site".

I don't necessarily hold that opinion, but I get the impression most folks I know do.

people will move to the next social media site (or jump to another medium if it's good enough) even before Twitter shuts down.

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.

Sure, but commercial entities generally shut down when there's too few users to justify the costs. But then you're not comparing the value of current Twitter shutting down but an empty wasteland Twitter shutting down. An empty wasteland Fediverse also wouldn't be of much use to the vast majority of people.

>Bingo. I say this all the time, Twitter is not immune from being a member of this list (Defunct social networking sites, wikipedia):

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.

nothing's stopping your local city council, library, or fire department from shoe-horning the ActivityPub protocol into their existing website (like WordPress or Drupal or whatever CMS they use) and immediately turning their site into their own Twitter service.

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.

By same logic, UUCP never died.

> This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit.

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.

"Trying to be self-funding" and "trying to make a profit" are very different things, and it doesn't make sense to conflate them.

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

Money was obviously an issue. $319 USD/month didn't cover the costs of running it. As noted in the post, "I’ve donated countless hours".

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.

There’s lots of space between “not doing things for profit” and “not caring about money”.

> 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.

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.

> in a thread about all of the data on that server being gone

Oh, is that what this thread is about? Who says it is?

Just as a small nitpick, there is still a community on Flickr. There are certain elements that Photographers get out of Flickr that we don't get from Instagram, or other platforms. This isn't to say that the service is as big or powerful as it once was, but it has done an adequate, if not satisfactory job, at meeting the needs of its base.

Very true in comparison to Instagram. Flickr doesn't strip your metadata and color profiles. They allow uploading actual rectangle photos instead of square or square-ish. They don't compress the hell out of the images. They store an original of the upload (great for an archiving failure). There's also more community-building tools even if they're no where near the vibrancy of a decade ago (though the unlimited storage is probably what led to the decline as many folks just dumped everything on it).

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.

I did go for the jugular a bit :-)

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.

All in all, it doesn't mean much. Mastodon makes the domain part of your ID, so moving to another server isn't different than, say, moving to Twitter. Even if it's possible to move your existing content, it doesn't have significant value on an ephemeral timeline. You might as well save your backups and keep going.

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.

Mastodon does inform your followers when your account moves[0], but unfortunately doesn't allow you to automatically migrate your existing posts over to your new account.[1]

[0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8003

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

"What will you do when MySpace shuts down?"

We will ALL collectively move to another platform, instead of some users having to move multiple times because the server they are no closed.

Also worth noting that MySpace is still running and though far below peak usage still has millions of monthly visitors, likely more than Mastodon.

Well, I shut down my FB page 6 years ago and didn't move anywhere else. The "social network" need died in me already.

Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events, you shouldn’t avoid doing something just because there could be a small chance of death(not walking out side to avoid a meteor strike).

Twitter by all means is superior in every sense, speed, network size, reach and content.

>> Twitter shutting down would need a couple black Swan events.

Can you (or anyone) please expand on this with some example hypothetical “black swan” events?

>> Twitter by all means is superior...

I hear they have the greatest censorship. Some say the best censorship. Nobody does censorship like Twitter. Not even close.

> black Swan events

I think we might be experiencing this just in this year with its new ownership about to occur.

Can you copy your toots across yet? Last I heard you can only migrate profile which seems a bit.. well I can do that by hand in 10 minutes

E: called them tweets

You are correct. There is currently an open issue[0] requesting support for migrating posts, that was opened in 2019 and unsurprisingly has some comments from today pointing out how useful such a feature would be.

[0] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

To be clear, when you move accounts, your old server will notify the servers of all the people who follow you such that they will silently be updated to following your new account. This is not something you can do yourself at all; you can contact all of those people and tell them about your new account, but then they'd have to take action to follow it.

Why not consider twitter, Facebook, tumblr as decentralized instances of social media? Why build decentralization into the tech instead of having decentralization through multiple companies existing? A real community is being destroyed here, even though other similar ones exist

Though not a social service, the recent shutdown of Stadia is likely indicative of how corporate shut downs will be handled.

This article is replete with examples of the weaknesses of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit.

> 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.

I always wondered when twitter is ultimately shuttered if they will hand off (at least all the public facing) tweet to some place like the the library of congress for historical purposes.

>This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit.

And one of the weaknesses of a decentralized model compared to a distributed one.

It sounds like the only actual advantage is 'you get to keep the same account'?

That doesn't seem like something most people are going to care about.

Closed source dies with the lack of money. Open source dies with the lack of users and attention. The problem is, money buys users. So for FOSS, it's a chicken and egg problem with the interplay of money and eyeballs.

Doesn't at&t already own flkckr by way of yahoo?

SmugMug bought Flickr quite some time ago.

https://www.smugmug.com/together/

what exactly happens to all the URLs that were linking to mastodon addresses? surely those are now going to die?

Myspace still hasn't shut down

> f*c*book

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

No, it seems we're making a little joke: The asterisks don't necessarily have to mean 'a' and 'e', do they? They could be some other letters...

Thanks for your hard work Ash, and sorry to hear about your loved one.

As much as I love the Fediverse, I think the culture leans toward instances that are too big. I think the number of people on each instance should be much closer to 1 than 1000.

The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for end-to-end encryption.

I think part of it is there are instances that are just sooooo broad. Mastodon.social … shouldn’t exist? I think. It’s too broad and kinda duplicates the general social network issues of everyone using the thing.

Meanwhile there are loads of three-digit-user instances that are more focused (and have less problems on a tech level, and on a social level)

I think the project instances exist so people will at least get on board, try it, figure it out, and move on to a more suitable instance rather than abandon the whole thing entirely. The alternative is losing lots of potential users at the front door.

Honestly I think some big issues are that not everyone has a fast machine thats going to be up all the time to host the instance. It would be cool to implement something like BitTorrent but for websites.

hypercore :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaker_(web_browser) https://github.com/AgregoreWeb/agregore-browser/

Isn't that what IPFS aims to be?

https://ipfs.io/

Zeronet kind of do this

A major note in the Mastodon fediverse brought down by the fact that it's administered by one person who, despite the fact they are running a social network node, never built up the real world trust connections to find somebody they could share the toil of administration with or tap in when it was time for them to bow out because we are all mortal.

The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems.

I'm not a Mastodon user, but this is haunting. Just like shady data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds" are running VPN nodes, subreddits etc, this architecture is practically designed for malicious actors. It wouldn't surprise me if it's already being used this way on other nodes.

To be clear, in 2005 this would have been great, tech is moving fast so one has to remain humble when critizising architectural decisions. Nevertheless, today we can't trust private data in hands of benevolent (and often de-facto anonymous) volunteer actors, if we want scale and security in the decentralized (or even federated) world.

We have had enormous progress in applied cryptography, both in social apps (Signal, Matrix) and defi (some successes, many failures to learn from). We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it. Doesn't mean that all data on a social app must be private, but DMs and invite only "groups" should be.

Currently, the typical website with per-node password auth doesn't satisfy these constraints, since credential harvesting is trivial. It's very difficult to build E2EE web apps and even if, users have no habit of keeping secrets on-device. The client itself needs to be vetted and accessed securely. Perhaps Matrix is best positioned in this space.

(Please correct me if I got any details wrong)

If this is a concern of yours, don't migrate your account. All instance admins play the role of Twitter CEO on Mastodon, which means (much like Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Netflix, et. al) they can access all data you've trusted them with. The point of Mastodon is that it broke down these data silos, and give people more sane ownership models for social media. Your privacy concern is valid, but Mastodon doesn't advertise itself as a private protocol. A glorified microblogging platform doesn't really have a whole lot of data to leak besides maybe your DMs.

> We should have the expectation for private data that the operator cannot read it

That's called heterogenous encryption, and it's the technological equivalent of Mythril. End-to-end encryption doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data. In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account. These operators literally need to read your data to operate on it. I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here.

If you want to talk about architectures designed for malicious actors, you probably shouldn't start with distributed systems. Monolithic, profit-driven corporations like Twitter are much easier to tempt with salacious "data brokers, political shadow companies and "the feds""

> End-to-end encryption doesn't stop the operator from decrypting your data.

It's literally the opposite. E2EE means only the participating parties can decrypt the messages.

> In fact, pretty much everyone has to, since raw encrypted TLS data can't just get slotted into your OneDrive/iCloud account.

TLS is not designed for e2ee, it's designed to protect traffic in the client server model. This is referred to as in-transit encryption. SSL got traction mostly due to e-commerce.

> I genuinely don't know how you would engineer a more secure architecture here.

Prior to computers, people pre-shared their symmetric secret keys only with those they trusted, precisely to make their messages secure from spies, couriers etc. This is e2ee.

You are right that "you have to trust our almighty server" is commonplace, but they absolutely do not have to. In 1991 came PGP which let you have e2ee over email (even if your peer is offline). Signal, Matrix etc use more advanced protocols to provide even more security and useful features. Even whatsapp and telegram have e2ee in most ways, although they have been criticized for not satisfying all criteria.

You might be misunderstanding E2EE. In double ratchet system, not even the operator or host can decrypt DMs.

Fully homomorphic encryption is also possible to operate _on encrypted data_ albeit computationally impractical still for a couple years.

to build on that, a mastodon instance's "federated" feed is the feed of stuff that everyone on the server is receiving.

Having publicly readable posts is core to the whole idea, just like Twitter.

Note: there are some interesting forks like Hometown[1] that have interesting privacy variants. The big feature I'm envious of in Hometown is the ability to send a message _just_ to people on your server that will never leave it. BUT overall mastodon is 100% about publicly readable information (like Twitter). If someone isn't comfortable with that they shouldn't use Mastodon.

[1]: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown

> The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems.

This is something that perplexed me when Mastodon and Diaspora and others appeared: why would you want to recreate/mimic the toxicity of FB and Twitter ? The resharing, the upvotes, etc. If social networks all have the seeds of their defaults, why clone it ?

Mastodon and other Fediverse microblogging platforms aren't trying to recreate these abusive systems. They don't show boost/favourite counts, don't offer paid promotion or adverts, don't have the manipulation of the timelines or the other abusive dark patterns used to keep people hooked on the toxic pipes. I feel that being able to show appreciation for a post, or send it to the people who are interested in you, are both important ways to interact and can be implemented without the unhealthy byproducts of the corporate social media orgs.

It does show boost/favourite counts once you open a toot, and just like on Twitter you can also click to see the list of people who have boosted/favourited

The other parts are true, but the "manipulation of timelines" is just a question of time because it's useful if you follow lots of people. As long as it remains opt-in and a setting it's a good thing. I'm planning an ActivityPub implementation for myself and "manipulation of timelines" is one of the features I want to add the most for my own use.

Point being that deviating from a strictly chronological timeline isn't the problem. Doing so in a non-transparent way the user has little control over is.

I also believe character limits is a problem and that it ultimately leads to polarization.

That too is easily modified. Mastodon hardcodes the value a few places, or at least used to. Pleroma has config settings to separately enforce a local limit on how much you're allowed to write, and a hard limit above which it will drop remote posts. Problem is the latter - any instances which increases the post length too much will need to consider that they'll effectively make federation unreliable for their users because most other instances will have a hard limit above which they'll drop or truncate posts.

But overall it's easy to iterate on this, and you can try things on your own instance or your own "corner" of likeminded instances while still be able to interoperate on most things.

Coming up with "non-toxic" social media is extremely difficult and probably not something programmers can solve.

Social media inevitably becomes a reflection of the users, and humans all have a thread of toxicity running through them.

yeah, idk if you could count this as a success when by his own admission there's so much user data essentially sited on one single point of failure/compromise.

Ash: I'm sorry to hear about the health issue that precipitated this. I wish you the best outcome but realize that that does not always happen.

Rest: As someone who does not (yet) use Mastodon, I'm curious about the impact of a single node shutting down. At least in this case this is happening in an orderly manner and with warning.

I'm also curious if this is a problem with Mastodon in general or did this particular node just become too popular for its own good. I seem to recall that some instances (Adam Curry's No Agenda related instance) limiting membership. Or perhaps I'm thinking of something else. But that may not help if the problem is traffic generated by the entire network as seems to be hinted at in the post.

Please excuse my ignorance of how Mastodon operates that may be implicit in my questions.

Mastodon has a migration path for users to move to other instances. So when the server admins allow it (i.e. don't just shutdown, or kick someone off) moving is rather easy.

Today, several in my mastodon timeline mentioned they finished the move. But without them mentioning, I, an outstander (i'm on another instance) wouldn't notice it.

What will happen, though, is that a portion of the users won't migrate. Either because they forget, or they can't be bothered, are "zombie accounts", or because its too challenging: it does involve down- and uploading and/or copypasting zips/datafiles. This means a bit of pruning or culling, and that could be considered good, IDK.

What will also happen, on a more technical level, is that other instances and maybe bots and automation will hit timeouts and connection errors when it really shuts down. Most instances and fediverse software can handle this just fine, it's built with this mind; it might at most cause some overhead and load. Some flakey or poorly developed software might crash or break (for a moment).

> Today, several in my mastodon timeline mentioned they finished the move. But without them mentioning, I, an outstander (i'm on another instance) wouldn't notice it.

Do you mean that part of the protocol allows for a migration process that includes changing who your follows are pointing at? (assuming all servers involved are up to date and have this feature) I.e. did your account automatically start following your friends' new accounts?

Yes. The process has three steps: First, you update the receiving profile to "allow" the move by pointing at each other using the as:alsoKnownAs relationship. This allows everybody to confirm that the receiving account is participating in the move, and authorizes it. Then, you update your old account with the "movedTo" property, so that any new users who look up your account will see a notification that you've moved. Finally, you send out a Move activity to all of your followers, pointing at the new account. Automatically, all of your old followers who receive the Move activity will send Follow activities to the new "receiving" profile.

This process doesn't update any of the old content from your account, which was regarded at the time as a necessary simplification because of the issues of updating canonical URIs for accounts on one system to accounts on another system (different software might have different expected routes, you might need to store lookup tables, etc etc. It just opens up a huge can of worms). In practice this doesn't really matter that much since Mastodon is used primarily for microblogging and less for, well, actual blogging. If you were designing a more fully-featured social blogging platform like a Medium or Tumblr equivalent you'd probably want to put some more thought into that side of things.

If it doesn't update the old content on your old account, then is there a way to copy the old content to your new account?

Yeah, this is how it works. I don't know the technical details/internal terminology, but I've definitely had a few accounts I follow switch servers for various reasons. It was basically just "oh hey so-and-so's handle changed" from my perspective, which is kinda neat.

> a migration path for users to move to other instances

Thanks for clarifying - without that bit of background, this post reads like, "if I can't have it, no one can". But I guess the post is directed at people who do understand the background behind mastodon in general (which I and OP didn't).

Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a cryptographic verification based on a private key held by the user, so that they can prove to other servers/users that they are the same account as one that existed on a server that has shut down already? Is there something like that in Mastodon?

It doesn't involve cryptography, but mastodon has for at least a couple of years supported link-verification in profiles (it basically checks if a link back to your mastodon profile exists on a page linked on your profile), so a linking to a page that only you credibly control (say, a personal website) is the de-facto system of decentralized user-verification on mastodon.

Edit: supported since 2018 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/8703

It does sort of involve crypto: if the page you control weren't served over HTTPS it wouldn't be too hard (DNS poisoning) for someone else to trick a server into verifying the wrong user.

If DNS poisoning is so easy why don't you perform the same attach on Let's Encrypt since that also uses plain HTTP.

I think most people in this situation do the same thing people do on Twitter when it suspends an account for nonsense reasons like telling a Nazi to eat paste: make another, make a post, share it with a few friends off Twitter/Mastodon, have them RT/boost to circulate it within their circles. This seems to work pretty well.

Cryptographic certainty is fun to think about, but sometimes you just need people.

Well, seems like this is a clear path for improvement: a decent UI tool for migration between instances

Such mechanism already exists. Look for the comment by @nightpool

It works best between Mastodon instances, but between different apps the migrations are often also supported. New apps like GoToSocial have the migration still as open issue sitting in their tracker, but will support as well.

Very little actually. Depending on how the shutdown works in practice, the impact is basically nothing. Other instances just stop receiving updates from the instance, which just results in the users in the closed instance being cached artifacts (zombie accounts) that need to be cleaned out manually.

There's also a "self destruct" feature in Mastodon which is the nice way to shut down an instance; it issues account deletion messages for every account to every instance it federates with. The idea being that this results in the federating instances processing the account deletions accurately.

As for requests to the original server; basically all instance software (Mastodon included) implement a backoff mechanism, meaning that if after 3 months your server is still returning 404s when requesting new information, the software will quietly stop requesting new info unless explicitly asked to do so by a user.

A know a fair amount of Fedi folk who have moved instances. The move feature means we haven't lost touch, that they haven't lost their network. Some have even moved to start their own instance, or chose to move elsewhere. Whilst I am sure many lament not being able to bring posts to a new account, they can be exported and it's one's network which is most important.

I myself moved off mastodon.technology when I didn't agree with a change to the ToS, and was banned from mastodon.social without reason or redress, and neither event meant I had to start from scratch.

We're already seeing hundreds of people migrating to other nodes.

> The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer.

I always suspected this would be a massive problem with Mastodon. I contemplated running a server, but there's no way to know beforehand when you'll be running into a limit, like cost or time. Can you really build a social network on volunteers that invest their own money and time, with little reward?

The tech also doesn't help.

It's a "typical" Rails application: large, convoluted, lot's of moving parts, and services, and generally slow as molasses (solved by throwing more hardware at it). As experienced Rails dev(ops), I managed to run and help run an instance, but it's not something done on a friday afternoon, let alone scale up.

What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services. I'm thinking about the difference between setting up a gitlab or a gitea. The first is Rails, needs ruby, gems, bundler, workers, database server, redis, mailserver and whatnot. And thats for manually installing on a server - no pipeline or anything to manage future changes. The second a single binary (pre compiled from a go codebase) everything statically linked (even sqlite is built in, with option to upgrade to postgres). Plop it on a server start it and go. For an intranet you might even skip putting a server/https in front, just run on exposed ports.

We can dockerize all the ruby-stuff, but that might make it easier, it doesn't make it simpler, it really makes it more complex. And the performance-issues aren't solved.

The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on your VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and simple servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a huge, slow and hairy beast.

There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in terms of memory & cpu usage.

DB backend is postgres. It's also by default far less cache heavy than Mastodon (which caches every external attachment, avatar and header locally, which causes a lot of issues since it's the main reason instances run out of disk space).

Featurewise it actually surpasses Mastodon on almost everything except for not offering a tweetdeck-like UI.

[1]: https://pleroma.social/

> What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services.

I'm working on exactly that: a service that acts as an ActivityPub server (code[1], example[2], example application running on top of it[3]) for users in the form of a static binary. It supports multiple storage backends that can be selected individually or all together at build time and it can be extended to many more.

[1] https://github.com/go-ap/fedbox

[2] https://federated.id

[3] https://littr.me

> The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on your VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and simple servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a huge, slow and hairy beast.

Even if you get the tech stack solved to an easily deployable package: The problem is you still need to invest immense amounts of time on moderation. Some of that responsibility is enforced legally (e.g. CSAM, warez, US COPPA, EU GDPR, German NetzDG), some of it socially (e.g. kicking Nazis, conspiracy spreaders or other forms of hate speech out), some of it by the federation system (e.g. kicking spammers out) and some of it you need to do to keep your community healthy (e.g. kick general trolls and creeps out). If your instance allows adult material, gambling or games, you'll need to moderate your instance as well in some jurisdictions. And you'll need someone always available to support police, court and secret service requests.

Maintaining a service that hosts user-generated content is a thankless nightmare, and no matter what you do it is a huge liability. In the end, either you make your users pay for it in cash (subscription fees, patreon/gofundme/paypal donations), with their data (advertising) or you'll eventually burn out (such as the author of the blog entry).

Oh, and add on top of all of that the constant dealing with abuse: 4chan edgelords DDoS'ing your instance "for the lulz", random skiddies constantly running exploit scans against your server (which additionally means you have to have someone 24/7 to upgrade software in the case of a 0-day), people reporting your server / IP to blocklists to get you booted off the net... then you have to take care of hardware maintenance itself, making backups, testing backups. It's a full time job essentially, requiring an awful lot of time, money and connections (e.g. lawyers).

Would a pre-installed docker image be a solution to the setup issue? (Doesn't solve performance, of course.)

It's mostly large if you make it large. I run a single-user Pleroma instance, my fediverse network is relatively small and for the most part I can keep my timeline clean purely by reaction.

Even having around 20 users or so is still relatively manageable (used to run an open signup instance in the past). Basically as long as you don't exceed Dunbars Number[1], moderating a fedi instance is fairly painless.

External moderation can generally be managed with snap decisions. If you use Pleroma (and you should, it's much more technically competent than Mastodon), you can manually disable external user accounts specifically from federating with your instance.

Beyond that, most fediverse servers kinda make it really obvious whether or not you want to associate with them; they tend to be fairly open about what is and isn't allowed on their about pages so if you get a misbehaving user, you can usually see at a glance if the problem is instance-wide or just some random vandal.

Your biggest burden really is local moderation, external moderation isn't a big deal at all.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

"Why we live in hierarchies: a quantitative treatise" https://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01744 might be a relevant read (Dunbar's Number does come up)

> Can you really build a social network on volunteers that invest their own money and time, with little reward?

You can at least use it for existing communities and "social networks": family, friends, geographical communities, hobby- or work-related ones. To provide them a somewhat self-administered space online to connect and share photos and other info. Thanks to federation this community can have its own "space" without being isolated from the rest of the internet. Open-ness can be somewhat gradual.

There's lots of different of ways to organize funding and the ongoing technical work for such communities.

I think it becomes harder to build sustainable instances the less socially connected the admins are to the average user.

The Fediverse isn't just Mastodon, and there are other microblogging platforms. Epicyon is designed to be a lightweight server: https://libreserver.org/epicyon/

"Epicyon is a fediverse server suitable for self-hosting a small number of accounts on low power systems."

In a testament to how the Fediverse really does Just Work, I stumbled across Bob, the developer, quite by accident from my Mastodon account and now follow him. His posts, from his Epicyon instance, appear just like anyone else on my home feed and we interact as if he lived on my home server. There are at least half a dozen people I interact with who aren't on Mastodon, either.

Yes, you can. However, you will also encounter nothing but grief because of jerks who want to screw it up. For a historical example of how this turns out, see FidoNet.

This has been a massive problem with everything since PHP stopped being popular. Wordpress is easy even for a layperson to setup

Sorry, but this simply isn't true. Hasn't been ever, really.

I say this as someone who set up and scaled one of Europe's large dedicated WordPress hosting platforms. Everything, from nginx-phpfpm to varnish to scaling that horrible mess of plugins and themes your Fiverr dev delivered beyond just five req/min.

It really isn't very easy. And certainly not simple.

It's also a governance issue. Any site or service that's run by a single person, whether it's well-financed or not, is subject to burnout, illness, death, etc. Having a team and/or having a succession plan can help insulate from the impact these can cause. I submit as an example Metafilter. Matthowie ran it himself for a very long time but over time built a team that took over when he "retired". It's one of those things that must be put in place well before it's truly needed and doesn't lend itself to last-minute scrambles.

Making friends is no small reward.

On the one hand, I am sad to hear about it and even more so due to the circumstances.

On the other, I feel a bit validated in my belief that we need to have professionally managed instances on the fediverse. "Community Support" only goes so far. Thousands of people using a service, but how many of them actually help with its upkeep?

I know that my instance has only a handful of paying users, and it is barely paying for itself, and far from paying all the work that I've put into it. But charging for access brings a lot of benefits: it keeps spammers and bots away, it is a good filter against trolls and best of all makes it explicit what is expected of all parties.

Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something.

Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth" and so on, looking at you AWS).

Because most people don't want to pay for something that they (think) can get for free.

The other problem is that charging $1/month is a practical pain in the ass. For micropayments, processors will easily take 20-30% of that.

Saying it as the person in charge of developing Mastodon, probably the most likely reason more servers don't charge for access is that it's not built into the software, so it would require either customizing the code or manually sending out invites based on external payments (e.g. Patreon, some servers actually do that). I would imagine the other likely reason is that complexity of signing up as a business with your local tax office, charging the right taxes based on where the customers are located, and accounting. I do absolutely agree that paying for your account would make running the servers so much more sustainable.

$1500/mo does not even begin to cover a single 24/7 oncall devops person’s rate.

Well if only having your own server on Mastodon was realistic, instead its totally impossible to get discovered.

There is fix for this, which is Fedverse Relays, but guess what ? Mastodons official servers don't use them.

I need to understand this obsession with "getting discovered via the application itself".

I mean, what's the problem of using other means of communication to publish/promote your identity?

I am far from being internet famous, and I get at least one follower every week on Mastodon simply because I put it on my Twitter bio.

That simply isn't true. I'm a nobody and plenty of folk have found me from seemingly inane posts. People have found me out of the blue, from across the Fediverse, and I have no idea why; all I do know is we now chat frequently and without either of us even looking for one another. What's impossible is to discover how to use a platform without reading the documentation, and assuming that algorithms will just do the work for us.

That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to another person.

Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO.

- Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.

- Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.

- People don't want to self-host.

The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single controller.

[1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr

[2] https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol

> - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance.

you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work

> - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator.

There is no "private data" on mastodon, I think it gets communicated enough that admins will have access to direct massages. it even says to you "Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon."

if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;)

> - People don't want to self-host.

True MOST ppl don't want to host, but they are a few that like it and even get money for providing a public service. So I don't have to host smth, I just have to find someone hosting it.

Account migration is a redirect. Your posts do not carry over, and the experience is pretty clunky.[1] Your name alias is tied to the server you created it on, rather than tied to your identity and all that it carries (posts, data, network effects, followers).

Social networks should have private data and E2EE, plain and simple. And the hosting challenges and centralization is why we are here discussing Mastodon.

[1] https://edtechfactotum.com/migrating-to-a-new-mastodon-home/

> you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work

Maybe 2 minutes for the technical side, then 2 months of getting all your old followers to follow you at your new address.

> if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;)

Or use a different protocol...

So it boils down to purchasing an NFT to participate, if yes, I’m not sure how long it will last. I’ve been trying to get a namespace on ENS since forever, and no payment processor wants me to buy eth. If that itself is a major hurdle I’m not sure how people will ever join.

I don’t believe it will feel like this. “Buying an NFT” will be more like “paying for a service.” You visit a Farcaster client, and click the buy account name/domain button, it triggers a stripe payment, and then you are given a private key for the account.

A savvy user could circumvent this and use the blockchain directly if they want to pay in crypto and/or cut down on the payment processing fee.

My condolences to the admin, this is sad news.

This strengthens my conviction that federation is a bad architecture for something like Mastodon. A fully distributed system, urbit being the easiest to try right now, can't stick someone with the responsibility to keep a bunch of other people online. It can't stick those people with the responsibility to move off the server. Each user runs a server process, locally or on a remote machine. If any of those goes offline, all the services and data it was providing are gone, but no other user accounts are affected.

Federation works fine for Matrix, although I still think the full peer architecture will dominate long-term. It's less disruptive to something like chat to switch user names because a homeserver shuts down.

Mastodon instances get linked into, and all those links are going to break. Running a redirect for those URLs to the numerous new account homes is impractical given that a lack of time and commitment to server maintenance is the issue.

I think you could create a system that's resilient to such issues even with federation (not saying it's easy, though), and Matrix actually has a solution in the works for this – decentralised user accounts [1].

And all of this makes me wonder – maybe it's better to re-implement something like Mastodon on top of Matrix. If Matrix adopts decentralised user accounts, that would seemingly solve such issues automatically. There was a POC Matrix based Twitter clone demonstrating this, actually [2] (but without the decentralised accounts yet).

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/246

[2] https://github.com/hackervera/freebird

Doing full P2P just isn't there yet. It makes total sense but without talking about some web3 Blockchain, it's hard to get everyone to run a distributed database, identity server, etc without it being some single binary.

> Each user runs a server process, locally or on a remote machine.

Mastodon (and similar services) would benefit greatly from (a) requiring users to own their own instances, via commoditized hosting providers, (b) one-click or few-clicks transition between hosting providers, and (c) enabling serverless-style pricing.

Requiring users to own their own instances safeguards users from admin-shutdown.

Ease of migration safeguards users from poor hosting providers.

Serverless-style pricing (e.g. pay per federated message, not by CPU) reduces the financial barrier to entry for new and lite users who are not yet fully committed users.

I'm going to be frank, as a long time federated node admin. In the last few years I've seen so many admins act just like Ash. They have a huge heart and a lot of passion for federation. So they open their doors to thousands of users.

And I keep thinking that it's just not sustainable. I've worked in ops for over 20 years, I feel like that background has given me a healthy scepticism and a respect for Murphy's law.

So when I launched my Mastodon instance 4 years ago I decided from day 1 that it should be focused on my country, my language, and require new users to request access.

Just like the old BBS scene, you have to write a short motivation on why you want an account. This motivation is 100% for vetting out robots. Because let me tell you, I get on average 2 robots a week trying to sign up. Why? I have no idea. But my strategy has brought the number of spam robots on my instance down to 0.

I could never imagine being one of those admins who just left their doors wide open. Because I've been online since the 90s, I know how we used to exploit web services back in the day. I was part of that whole 4chan scene, doing online hooliganism.

If you're opening your doors to anyone, and hosting their content online on your domain, there is a whole slew of problems coming your way. And the "main" instance mastodon.social got to feel that when an AV vendor blacklisted them. Someone had been using their public profile to host C&C. Of course, why wouldn't they?

So now I see a very sad thing, my fellow admins are begging for rent and food money on Mastodon. Because they're spending so much money keeping their instance running. And God only knows how many robot accounts are taking up those resources.

I've said this so many times, but I'll keep saying it; keep the instances small and put focus on federation rather than fast growth. We want many, small, well connected instances rather than a few huge monoliths that need corporate money to keep going.

I don't care what all the naysayers in this thread are whining about, ActivityPub is amazing. Until someone launches a completely decentralized network that WORKS, AP is the one for me. Scuttlebutt looks interesting though.

I'll never get over the magic of looking at my public timeline and seeing posts cascade in from all over the world. A dozen different software platforms, some homemade, some unpublished, some open source projects, they're all talking. Thousands of forums from dozens of countries are all communicating with MY little instance. It's magic.

How hard is it to get connected to other instances? Is this done through personal relationships or prior history or can a complete outsider get involved? I know exactly zero people using Mastodon (that I'm aware of) but this sounds interesting and makes me want to try to set something up.

I believe Mastodon servers (and presumably, most of the rest) have a bootstrap list of other instances which they automatically federate with. If a user attempts to interact with an instance unknown to the server it then reaches out and begins federation. The user can follow, reply to and read the content on that server immediately, although sometimes it can take a little time for a full list of posts and profile data to appear. Admins can also choose various levels of blocking against federation of instances of their choice.

As a user this is all transparent. I follow loads of people from all over the Fedi (some of them not even microblogging platforms) and it basically just works.

The main tip for new and small instances is to use ActivityPub relays. There are curated lists in public git repos. They will make your public timeline pop, and allow your users to discover other users and instances to make real connections with.

So just allowing for personal connections will also work to federate but a lot slower.

From my very little experience, you can search for anyone in any instance as long as it's federating with the whole network.

The actual problem is... to know the person. There are no more suggestions from algorithms and no more million-followers accounts that you usually heard of, you need to dig to find people you find interesting.

This is why I haven't gotten into mastodon. What server do I choose? At best they're internet forums from the 90s where the admin eventually has to move on (for often valid reasons, like in this case.)

Also why does this random guy have MY data? Why does he need to trust a new admin with my data for a succession plan to be possible?

I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed. Mastodon federated at the wrong granularity.

I think the entire point is that those concerned about those things and who have the technical ability will create their own instances. And invite their network to their instance. As I understand it (probably poorly), people generally shouldn't just be joining random instances that end up getting really large, but rather there should be a LOT of instances, all interconnected, that are effectively run by the handful of "techies" in each given network. But sadly we still gravitate to a centralized model, trying to find the "right instance" to join, even though (again, as I understand it), people can communicate cross-instance just fine (assuming not blocked, etc.) I say this as someone who does not actually use Mastodon, I just haven't found the reason, even though I know folks whose instance I could likely join.

> I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed.

Where do you host your blog?

If all you are doing is consuming blogs then yeah RSS is a lot easier than choosing a Mastodon instance.

But if all you want is to just consume Mastodon, you can do that with RSS too. Almost every public profile in Mastodon has an RSS feed that's easy to discover (and most auto-discovery tools will do it for you).

The complication, just as with Blogs come from when you want to post. With RSS you still have to pick a blog host. Do you pick one of the big name cloud hosts like Blogger.com, Wordpress.com, or Medium.com? Do you pick a smaller host or self-host? If that, which blogging software or static site generator do you want?

Mastodon federated at the exact "same" granularity as RSS, it's just that generally more people assume they will post on Mastodon today (and more people have private/semi-private feeds) rather than just only consume public feeds. Choosing an instance is exactly like choosing a blog host. There are the big giant instances that are easier to get started but you "own" less control of them. There are the small community instances. There are instance hosting providers. There are plenty of opportunities to self-host if you have the technical determination. There are even multiple software options to consider: Mastodon, Pleroma, Mastodon-forks like Hometown, Pixelfed, and many more (those are just the ones off the top of my head that federate with the ActivityPub "Fediverse").

Trusting an instance admin is just like trusting a blog hosting provider. They have "your data" because you've asked them to host it for you.

> I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed.

With all due respect an RSS feed is not "your" data, it's just data that you aggregated. You're not comparing it to the fediverse in good faith. If you must make a comparison you can do it with email: do you have an email address? Do you trust your email provider with your data? It's the same with ActivityPub based servers.

I pay a monthly fee to a business for my mail server, and I chose a business that makes data privacy a top selling point.

Tweets are microblogs. RSS technology is fine for publishing them. The Twitter client only needs to be an RSS reader. Replies, retweets, and likes are empty calories for end users. They're the engagement bait social media uses to power an attention economy.

The fediverse copied the wrong features. There's no point for it to have an attention economy because no one is monetizing the attention. Therefore there's no need for the empty calorie features, and no need for my data to be on someone else's server.

If you don't trust anyone with your data, just host it yourself.

Well, where do you expect your data to be stored? In the ether?

On a server that I personally own or rent. Why does my data need to be anywhere else?

>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.

I think that's a very salient and responsible choice. With the freenode debacle coming to mind immediately I think it's important to remember how risky a change of ownership can be in particular if the users are not aware of it. Certainly a painful decision to shut the instance down, but a decision with a lot of foresight. An active migration might create disarray but it also forces people to make an active choice to trust another host.

I don't at all think this is a reasonable choice. A group of like minded adults should be able to establish some form of stewardship. it's the basis for human civilization.

That said the maintainer has my sincere prayers for his family and for his path in life.

Thank you for your volunteering and I hope your family member gets better Ash.

I think it’s unfortunate for us users but at least on an open source platform migrating to a new instance is possible. That said - this will be a hit to the community.

It just shows how relying on infrastructure with a low bus factor is risky and something for future attempts to consider.

> relying on infrastructure with a low bus factor is risky

There are risks to every "bus factor," but I can totally get behind requiring a team of a certain size to be behind whatever infrastructure I rely on.

Most of my dependencies have a bus factor of 1 (Yours Troolie), as I write packages for my own consumption.

They are really, really good modules, and I publish them as general-purpose modules, but don't expect people (other than me) to really use them.

I did write a fairly massive infrastructure project, and managed it, alone, for ten years, then it was taken over by a team, and "went viral," in a sense. The best thing I ever did for that project, was toss the keys to the new team, and walk away. It's in very good shape, now.

Reminds me of a point I made about Pinboard. It's surprising to me that despite the success of open source software we haven't developed good systems for community administration of public services. Web services that aren't owned by large companies tend to be run with a bus factor of 1.

> I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26200441

Public services like this have private databases, and owned domains. Both of which require clear plans for stewardship if you want to avoid these issues. Much like a non-profit still needs some organization and roles assigned to it's members, so too do FOSS (services).

> A member of my family was very recently diagnosed with a terminal illness. I am doing everything I can to support them.

I am sorry to hear that, but I can totally support them, and sincerely wish them the best of luck, dealing with a pretty awful situation.

The fundamental problem here is monetization, and the perfect solution is ads. Apparently this was discussed and rejected because people would instantly move to another server[1].

Not so. Ads on twitter don't bother me much, and ads on a mastodon server would give me some confidence that the server would stick around, and not beg me for money.

Monetization with ads would also give people an incentive to market their server.

[1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8913

If you start posting promoted content on a Mastodon server, many instances will immediately defederate with you and/or add you to Fediblock. It's fine if that's something you want to do, and there's nothing in the protocol that stops you from doing so, but everyone else will stop "being your friend" so-to-speak. That's probably why most people wanted to leave.

I'm talking about showing ads on the website, which is what's discussed in the github issue I linked, not pushing ads to federated instances.

At least from a design perspective, I would highly encourage users to check out Secure Scuttlebutt. It solves many problems highlighted here. Dominic Tarr really did some excellent work building it.

Enthousiasm is paramount in community work. But managing server infrastructure is more and more complex and it won't go simpler. People should consider joining associations which would be responsible, not individuals. Maybe less servers but larger and better managed ones. Associations are more resilient than individuals.

While Mastodon.technology may be closing, Mastodon.tech is welcoming new members with the same TOS as found at Mastodon.technology. We are in communication with creator, Ash.

We invite you & anyone to register: https://Mastodon.Tech/registration

We've had over a year's experience running Mastodon but the Ruby platform is not resource efficient nor well suited for this purpose. We installed Pleroma for Mastodon.tech to avoid the inevitable problems Ruby created at Mastodon.technology for Ash. Pleroma is equally connected to the Fediverse.

Since 2006 we've hosted a technology forum so this is a natural extension: https://hostboards.com/discussion/5854/hostboards-partners-w...

The unnerving thing about this post is just how I could very realistically find myself in similar shoes. I do many things and bet on my ability to learn as I go. Sometimes it does take some extra hours. Time is finite.

Why bravery to say "I don't know; I could probably find out but I cannot."

This is almost exactly what happened with me hosting my GNU Social instance, kwat.chat. I enjoyed the community and the feeling that I was helping the fediverse. I let my users know well in advance it was closing down so they had time to move to another instance.

Federation seems to be the way to go but current implementations seem a bit lacking from what I've seen.

If you have an account with a Mastodon server, what if the owner takes a disliking to you? What if their server shuts down and you can't migrate your account/identity?

Realistically every person should be hosting their own personal Mastodon node to at least base their account/identity around it, then consume/interact with content via federation but self-hosting isn't a system that works for "normal" people.

Maybe it already works like this (I haven't looked into their code/Mastodon at all recently) but a system where your identity is federated/shared across nodes in the same way torrents are mean that the more communities that you participate in the more "backed up" your identity is; if one node shuts down, your identity is still stored across many other nodes. Hell, it would be possible for people to run identity nodes that deal with nothing other than acting as an identity host/backup for users.

I think the PR advantage for things like Twitter is that people can go to one place: "Twitter", it's easy and you can locate all content from there. Mastodon still seems a little fragmented by comparison. We all might be tech people but I think for regular people to adopt there could be a few improvements.

IMO there's nothing wrong with passing the torch to a new maintainer, this is just part of the design of mastodon. People shouldn't arbitrarily trust an instance maintainer on mastodon any more than they should trust google, twitter, fb, or a tor node with their data. The info they chose to share in plain text with a mastodon instance should be considered compromised. All that matters is the future; where will you send your data going forward?

It's part of the design of mastodon that the maintainer can pass the admin role to a new maintainer, and if a user doesn't approve, they can migrate to a new instance. If other instances don't approve, they can blacklist it.

Is "migrating to another server" as simple as singing up on other servers? Or is there a different straightforward way?

Moving to another instance is pretty easy: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration

It doesn't move your toots, but followers don't have to do anything to still follow you on your new account.

> It doesn't move your toots

does that even count as migrating then

Fundamentally I've always been uncomfortable with the fact that Fediverse nodes aren't interchangeable in some critical ways - that your identity is tied to a single node, not the aggregate whole. This highlights why.

Having nodes control moderation and the like on traffic that originates in and flows through their node makes sense. Having your identity tied to a node has always seemed wrong to me.

edit: and to Ash, best wishes in taking care of your family in this difficult time. I imagine that giving up on your admin volunteer role was a very difficult decision but you did the right thing.

Sorry to hear this. Family must come first.

The mastodon.technology had some interesting folks. I've migrated my account to the mastodon.social instance. Moving accounts on Mastodon is pretty easy so that's a positive.

As per my comment in reply to monkin, I keep wondering why there isn't an open source website that makes it (almost) as easy to setup a fediverse instance as it is to create a Discord or a subreddit. Surely it's possible for a service to have a nice frontend UI for easy administration by non-technical users, while at the backend dealing with the technical API calls to cloud providers to make it all happen?

This sort of website would be incredibly light weight (just API calls, no data storage), and the users would not be tied down to it; as long as they retain ownership of the login credentials to whatever cloud provider they choose, even if this front end shuts down the fediverse instance won't. And if it's open source, it would be easy to migrate to another such 'frontend management' website.

I have thought about this quite a bit, and it seems like a great idea - is there something I am missing (aside from it perhaps being nontrivial to set up a Fediverse instance via API calls to cloud providers)?

Of course, a clear issue is that there would still be (small) ongoing costs even for tiny instances, so it would not be the same as Discord or reddit in terms of having a 'free tier'. But the pitch of a 'personalized social media website' seems like a pretty cool idea and i'd be willing to pay a bit to try it out.

It doesn't fully match your requirements, but an easy way to setup a mastodon instance is https://masto.host/ Does that help?

What an interesting turn of events.

As somebody that used to be an admin of a decently large community, here’s some free advice for anybody that’s trying to start something like this:

Get mods. Get them early. Get them from the pool of your most enthusiastic users. Fire them when they perform poorly. Continuity plans will be a lot easier to come up with if you’ve been sharing the burden of managing the community for a long time, heck they might even be emergent and obvious after long enough.

Huge respect. My friend is running a forum (I know madness today) and he is totally sick of it, but has no heart to close it nor trust someone will be able to take over given it is losing money (people - assuming "competition" - were posting adult content and then reporting to Google, so advertising eventually got turned off and other advert providers don't pay enough to keep the lights on).

I had been worried about this with respect to Mastodon for a long time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30447645

I think it was only a matter of time before the human resources issue came front and center. My hope is that there can be a good balance between small federated instances kept alive by altruistic volunteer admins and larger instances with enough moderation and funding to handle the number of users that a social network expects but increase centralization. Maybe the conclusion will be that no matter how the technology scales, finding a way for the instances to be kept alive will be a social problem that requires constant attention.

The reliability issue also makes me wonder how much of the Fediverse is setting itself up for link rot and the loss of unique content after their maintainers lose passion or move on. And that wouldn't be because of a business decision that is hard to empathize with (in the case of Google+), but simply because a single human body has its limits.

> I want to give you as much time as possible to download your data and migrate to a new server.

Does it mean you can download your messages and put them back in the global conversation ? How does that work ? Are those messages stored only on one instance ? Do they disappear forever when an instance disappears ? Will users switch to new identity from another instance and import messages or is this lost ?

You can download and save your social network, filters, block lists, profile and all of your posts. Separately there's a feature to move accounts, which redirect folk to your new account and performs an automatic follow of your network from your new account. Posts are not migrated. If an instance disappears, everything is gone.

Thanks.

The solution to silicon valley hegemony just isn't decentralization. It's non-profit leadership. Think Wikipedia. Think NPR. The model doesn't even really need to change from an ad-based revenue model so long as there isn't a bullwhip at the backs of execs demands grow or die. Just keep revenue as close to break even as possible with enough cushion for a downturn.

I don't think Wikipedia and NPR have aged that well though, there are lots of topics where they're essentially (or literally) paid propaganda for their major donors and because they're a non-profit it's less clear what's what than if they had paid advertisements

Idk what you're referring to but absolutely no human enterprise of any kind will be immune to corruption or ineptitude. It's 100% guaranteed to happen sometimes even in a communist Star Trek utopia. All we can ever do is remove or mitigate the incentives to serve purely selfish goals. Public media is substantially less corruptible than corporate media but there are no absolutes.

Do you have examples?

a couple people have mentioned it in passing, but i figured this warranted a top-level comment

anyone considering setting up an instance and not wanting to worry about having to ssh in during the night and deal with maintence stuff just to talk with friends should 100% consider signing up with masto.host.

I've had an instance there for months now.

While there's some manual setup on his end (the guy who runs masto.host) from the perspective of someone wanting a new instance it's _very_ easy, and he does a great job of keeping everything up to date.

I'm extremely happy to throw money his way each month and _not_ have to worry about maintaining my instance beyond occasionally granting access to new users and proactively blocking remote instances. As a small, invite only, server I don't have to worry about a lot of BS from obnoxious humans.

Note: if you use masto.host you don't get ssh access to your server so there are some settings you can't tweak. I'm ok with that in exchange for never having to worry about maintenance.

Why the hell doesn't Mastadon encrypt data at rest so the admins aren't responsible for user privacy?

What the hell? Is this the 1990s?

I don't think "encryption at rest" is what you want, because it doesn't help you against the admin if the app still can/has to be able to decrypt it?

Encryption at rest protects against someone walking away with the database, not an admin.

Encryption isn't mentioned once in the whole Activity Pub spec.

Encryption at rest isn't good enough. E2E should be the default on federated protocols with breakouts for public content only needing to be signed.

Aw man. That sucks but it's totally understandable. Mastodon.technology was the first instance I ever joined back when someone told me what the fediverse was. I eventually left because I wanted to selfhost, but the general warm reception I got on that instance made me think the fediverse could really go places.

Best of luck in the future and best of luck with your family.

Most surprising part of this for me is learning that Mastodon was created because they wanted a version of Twitter with more censorship.

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastod...

Is there a way to host my own micro-instance/identity server instead of always migrating from one public instance to another?

Yup. Host a single-user instance.

Props to the instance for doing whatever they can to let people migrate their account somewhere else, and Mastodon has some provision already in place to create an alias and easily move your followers from one instance to another.

It is time that monetization in tech becomes and absolute given again.

I was not part of this community but I wish all the best to OP and his family.

Money solves problems and it shouldn't be considered bad to ask for a little compensation for upholding a service that thousands of people benefit from. That's the basis of anything meant to be sustainable. (I know lichess.org is an exception but tbh nobody knows for how long that's going to work out well.)

What do you think is the main issue with Mastodon not really getting mainstream adoption?

Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it?

Not enough marketing?

Bad UX?

1. as mentioned earlier, network effects of twitter

2. you can just sign up for twitter, you don't need to pick an open instance run by some stranger.

3. deploying a rails app isn't trivial, mastodon being written in rails and dependent on multiple DBs makes it harder to install and thus harder for people to run their own server.

As we continue to improve computing power and efficiency, I think the idea of using a federated social network so you can "own your data" is going to become less and less attractive. If you take this concept to its logical extreme, eventually everyone will run their own social networking server, and we'll be interconnected with each other through some kind of DHT magic. After all, the fediverse is still "someone else's computer", it's just that "someone else" in this case is some guy and not a for-profit company. It doesn't really solve the problem.

Network effects of twitter. Your friends are already on twitter if they still use this style of broadcast text based social media.

Also recent privacy concerns and less recent issues with internet hostility means we're already past peak twitter, so mastodon is having to break into a declining market.

IMHO, its decentralized nature just isn't compatible with most user, or the concept of social media.

It works for certain demographics but not most.

All of the above, plus little to no-one actually bothered to use it daily, with not enough users to even talk to and compared to Twitter, Mastodon has an extremely limited network effect.

This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.

I was not part of your community, but thank you for what you've done with it.

May you have all the needed grace, patience, wisdom, and strength (both physical and mental) to navigate this next stage of your life in caring for someone who needs you more than ever right now.

why is the maintenance cost of a Mastodon instance so high? What is the technology stack?

From my experience, both Mastodon and Pleroma are massively overcomplicated resource hogs that are hard to set up, configure, or navigate.

Pleroma too? Usually Elixir apps are much more efficient than RoR apps in my experience

Mastodon was created using the Ruby on Rails framework. Your able to quickly write applications at the cost of overhead from all the moving parts and the Ruby language in general (Though in recent years ruby has improved with the introduction of JIT into it's codebase).

Ah, that makes sense then.

I started out in Ruby years ago; wonderful language, doesn’t scale well.

Someone should rewrite it in Phoenix…

EDIT: Oh, someone did! https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma

Hope things go well for Ash.

Gaps/opportunities for Fediverse community:

- sustainable mgmt structure and plan for large nodes

- features to import content while not breaking existing ecosystem (it's currently possible to move followers and export content only, but not import)

This is predictable. A Mastodon instance, last I checked, involved installing a constellation of a half-dozen databases and services. That's insane. It should be a single binary.

PostgreSQL and Redis are a constellation of half-dozen databases?

Sorry, I wasn't precise: it's two databases (Postgres, Redis), an HTTP frontend (nginx) and specific versions of two interpreted language runtimes (Ruby, Node). The point stands.

Maybe things aren't meant to live forever; perhaps trying to make the ephemeral internet tied to long-lived permanent identities is the fundamental mistake.

Weakness of running a decentralized service: no money made, which means you have to give and keep on giving. The solution is to decentralize the hosting itself instead of leeching off the work of a few individuals. Mastodon credentials should use something like a bittorrent/blockchain db. It s ok to lose the posts

Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

One could argue that instagram and Facebook where not profitable in for many many years too.

That would be a) false because their creators were having high incomes anyway and b) irrelevant because mastodon will be unprofitable forever

Does anyone have an idea about the infrastructure requirements and the cost of running an instance with the size of mastodon.technology?

The pricing on masto.host should give you some idea of the requirements and cost:

https://masto.host/pricing/

I think they're the largest managed hosting provider in this space. Obviously they are charging a premium compared to deploying it all yourself, but I think the prices are fair, and the plans give you a pretty good idea of the resources required.

No offense to the other admin, but $200/mo for 50 active users is way too high. A Kubernetes cluster for 50 users is obvious overkill IMO. Maybe you did it that way for the learning aspect, which is fine. You should be able to host 50 active users for a 10th of that cost though. You can easily do it on a single VPS.

I run an instance of some ~450 users, ~50 active, on a managed k8s cluster and it's costing me ~200usd/month. So I'm actually moving to my own DC where I get more than twice the resources for less than half the price.

If you have DC and power sponsored you can get real far.

I am sad that they are shutting down but we have more options in the Fediverse still.

Its the rebirth of the promise of a censorship free internet. A lot of people have decided that its time we shut peoples mouths and stop them from talking 'for the greater good' - this is a pushback against it.

One day we will all remember why we should support free speech - god help us on that day.

Is this the company that was always begging for engineers here on HN?

The fediverse would benefit from a massive migration to Honk.

Thanks for everything qnd all the best!

All the best Ash, thank you!

will they be able to migrate their profiles?

Yes, mostly.

Mastodon supports both migrating your profile (followers and block lists, as well as metadata, but NOT content), AND exporting your content (posts, replies, and media uploads).

The process is pretty straightforward, and I've done this myself. You will lose your old content's persistent URL references, though federated copies of that content may still be accessible from other instances.

See:

Moving or leaving accounts: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/>

It's also possible to move an entire instance to a new machine:

Migrating to a new machine: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/>

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