Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hrbf | Hacker News Reader

Regarding Mastodon, I really like the idea behind it but always hit a wall when thinking about starting an instance.

The alternatives appear to be

* paying around $9/month for a managed instance

* hosting it yourself (with all the costs and responsibilities that come with yet another self-hosted service)

* signing up at a public instance (and potentially lose everything connected to it once an operator loses interest)

None of them sound particularly inviting. I don’t see either me or anyone I know paying at the rate stated for this kind of social media access. I don’t see me hosting an instance for an extended time and offering it to friends, much less the public. Should I lose interest or lack the resources to look after it, all of it disappears in an instant. Same when you stop paying for a hosted service.

From an outsider point of view – and likely I’m missing something major here – Mastodon appears to be a typical solution for technically-inclined people and adjacent subgroups, libertarians and communities that would be immediately blocked everywhere else (and possibly are on several Mastodon instances).

For a technological solution to work, it needs to solve the issues people have in a useful way. Since I cannot seem to grasp what issue Mastodon solves in a useful way, I’d be grateful for any enlightenment that’s not centered around the tech.

I keep saying that ActivityPub should be a static protocol to begin with, then people can host their profile on some Github Page easily. Effectively zero cost.

Mastodon doesn't require you to host an instance. You can sign up for an account on any instance of your choosing.

Every service offers a choice between "run your own" or "trust someone else". I don't trust Twitter but the people I follow are on there so I guess I'll keep my old account. I trust the Mastodon folks more because they're running on donations, which makes their profit model quite transparent.

The difference between the two is that Mastodon doesn't go down when one hosted instance collapses due to politics or spam or any other problem these servers face. Major servers can go down and there will still be plenty of content available through the distributed set of smaller servers.

Mastodon is also not as much of a combined network as it may look. It's more of a set of small social networks that all interact with each other, just like you used to be able to use XMPP to talk between chat services like Facebook and GTalk. Everyone sort of does their own thing on their own server but they have the option to also follow content from other servers.

Some people just like hosting instances. It gives some control back to the users that want it. It's good to have the option, but most people aren't expected to go that route.

There are definitely toxic servers just like on Twitter that are part of an optional blacklist that's being distributed online. Whether you want to apply that blacklist on your server is your choice; most people do, but server owners can make their own decisions. It's certainly no different from other social media in that toxic people ruin the experience for everyone, but with these things it's nice that the worst of the worst are siloed off in their own little space that you can choose to interact with if you really wish.

I'm a little surprised that Trump's instance has federation disabled, I guess they don't want to admit that they grabbed an old version or Mastodon and applied a theme to it after saying they're making a new service from scratch. Or maybe they don't want "leftist" outside influences in their little hateful echo chamber, because exposing your network to the outside does imply that you have to deal with people with differing opinions.

Personally, I don't do much with Mastodon because I use Twitter as a read-only platform. None of the people I follow mirror their posts into Mastodon and I don't care enough to set up an active Twitter proxy for an instance of my own to bridge the gap. The social networking problem is real.

Thanks for the details, of which most I already figured. However, your response does not address the issue of solving content disappearing once the instance goes away. It doesn’t matter if the network itself is alive when the content itself can disappear at any time without warning.

If I am correct in this assessment, I can really see no upside besides minutiae regarding an illusion of control to established social media. In this regard, a website with a comment section would serve much the same purpose.

If twitter.com goes down, all of twitter is gone. There is no secondary Twitter server or alternative service that you can use to do your day to day tweeting without completely depending on Twitter's centralised API.

If mastodon.social goes down, c.im accounts will still be live and I'll be able to follow them through a mastodon.nl account if I want to. It'll be sad to see the toots from mastodon.social disappear, but most of the Fediverse network will remain online. By segmenting users across different servers, the ecosystem can remain alive despite the collapse of a big server.

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