Hacker News Reader

Comment by Al-Khwarizmi | Hacker News Reader

I really want to like Mastodon, and every few years I make an attempt to join. But then, I am faced with the decision of choosing a server - if I like cooking and golf, do I join the cooking server or the golf server? What if I choose wrong? - and the choice overload makes me just give up.

And even if I really joined, then apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "enemy" servers' messages, and they could even read my DMs.

I think I see the point of Mastodon, and I think it can be really advantageous for certain uses (e.g. for relatively tight communities, that want to have bonds within the community but also connections to the outside) but I just don't see its fit for the average user and especially as a replacement for the generalistic, unstructured network that is Twitter.

View on HN

Two big, vanilla instances are https://mastodon.social and https://mas.to. Unfortunately they've both been struggling to keep up with demand lately. If you're paralyzed by choice, I'd say just go for one of those if / when they're accepting new users.

I think Mastodon would get more signups if interested people were just pointed at like ten working, non-specialized, non-tiny instances, rather than being confronted with hundreds of weird / non-working options. I realize this feels a bit contrary to the goals of federation, but the current situation seems to be causing a lot of potential users to retreat in annoyance and confusion.

They're wasting a massive opportunity. Mastodon should have been built to scale from the start because huge viral growth is exactly how social networks like this make it big.

As it stands right now, I am struggling to join because every mastodon instance I've checked is struggling with scaling.

Mastodon can scale, but it costs money. Most instances are hosted by people out of an interest to do good. Servers cost money... And for F/OSS project there aren't big pocket investors ... only funds, grants and hopefully donations.

Yes, when I say scalable, I mean ability to scale without having to spend bucketloads on new servers.

Many of the mastodon servers I am seeing pause new registration/break down are at a few thousand members, maybe 8k max. I dont know how Mastodon is implemented, but my intuition is that a well written C++, Rust, or even Java service should be able to handle that many users on a single instance.

Twitter makes -200m a year hosting their solution.

Mastodon by contrast spreads out this load to servers paid for by users, not by ads.

If you cannot join any servers, pay for a managed hosting provider to spin one up, or host yourself on a vps or a home server.

That may be well and true, but seems unrelated to the point i am making, which is that I would expect a single instance to be able to handle a few thousand users.

Sure one instance could support that if you pay amazon $2k/mo for a monster instance, but most do not have that kind of money to donate.

Most servers will be small, or you can host your own.

I think we are talking past each other.

I hear you.

It would be cool if someone rewrote it with a Crystal framework. Although there are limitations to this because it's faster than Ruby and similar to Ruby but not completely like Ruby.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398253

It's Ruby on Rails, which is the second slowest web framework I would consider reasonable for production use (after Django).

Ah, it is all beginning to make sense now.

Or go with the best tool for the job - Erlang/Elixir.

Sure, 'ability to scale' (scalability) might be an issue, but if you are using it, you will see that the majority pf people are on other servers or communities, some not even using Mastodon. Mastodon itself is just one of the implementations of the federated protocol that uses ActivityPub. A lot of alternatives exists, like misskey, pleroma, etc.

The other opportunity "they" are missing is that normally when a new social network struggles under the weight of new users, that's good publicity. Instead of going that route, people get offered a huge list of niche or unavailable options, or told they should run their own server. And unsurprisingly a lot of people are saying, fuck that.

It's frustrating to watch. I guess a lot of fediverse people don't actually want twitter normies on board though.

The point of the fediverse was never to match the scale of Twitter on a single instance. In fact, that's something of an anti-pattern.

These are the inherent trade offs of a distributed social network.

> The point of the fediverse was never to match the scale of Twitter on a single instance.

Of course. I don't understand why you are telling me this.

Mastodon isn't a commercial entity, so what's the opportunity that's being wasted? Its entire purpose is to provide an alternative model for social media on a non-profit basis. If that doesn't scale to Twitter or Meta levels so what? That's not the goal and it's certainly far beyond what those behind it could afford. Mastodon gGmbH has just two core developers.

Frankly, it's impressive that it's scaling as well as it has so far given the tiny size of the team and that all the servers are run on a volunteer basis.

In the category of large general instances, there's also https://mstdn.social and https://mastodon.online.

these large servers are being toasted right now beyond their capacity, which is giving the larger community a poor impression of this system.

I'd recommend joining smaller instances or like, just running your own. WordPress with the AP plugin is a nice alternative if you just want to feed your own thoughts out into the fedi-sphere.

Really surprised fosstodon.org doesn't get mentioned on HN more..

I want to try out Mastodont, and I also like to self host stuff.

Should I self host a mastodont instance and point friends and family to it when they want to create a mastodont account ?

Or would that be too much of a burden to manage ?

Or maybe it would be better to register on a specialized instance to already have an interesting local feed ?

How is that different from email though? Email providers will block whole swaths of IPs without telling you but you don't really notice it because it's very likely those IPs are only being used maliciously.

We're in a weird time right now though. Most people choose an email provider based on word of mouth or what their friends use but not enough people know about Mastodon to make that possible. Maybe Mastodon itself isn't the right answer, but I hope that a federated/distributed system is.

>Email providers will block whole swaths of IPs without telling you but you don't really notice it because it's very likely those IPs are only being used maliciously.

Most blocked instances in Mastodon are typically not being blocked for being malicious instances, but instead because they don't like the kind of tweets that are from there. Email servers are typically much more neutral and block IPs mostly to prevent spam instead of because they disagree with the speech contained in the emails originating from that IP.

Just a small note, you can't really choose wrong because you can participate across the fediverse, with other "servers", and even non-mastodon federated social media. However if it irks one to join a specific community, there does exist general purpose instances.

If I can’t choose wrong then why am I forced to choose at all? The user experience doesn’t add up.

Who should decide it for you then? Did someone mention blockchain already?

But seriously though, if you start to make it more distributed than it already is it will look even less like Twitter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tox_(protocol)

Most users don't care how distributed it is, or what it's architecture looks like.

They just want to sign up, and get an out-of-the box experience more or less like twitter.

If they don't care, then they should stay on Twitter. There isn't a better option right now than Mastodon/ActivityPub.

If Mastodon was fully centralized like Twitter and offered that experience, it would need an immense source of funding, and need ads, and shareholders, and would be losing money rapidly until some billionare bought it out... like Twitter.

Mastodon is built so that there is no single point of failure, but that means users have no single point of signup. It is like email, or matrix. Host your own on your own domain for a few dollars a month or join a friendly server paying the bill for you.

It is really not that hard, but people are just not used to having choices on the internet anymore.

At some point someone you know picked Twitter and you did too. Maybe find some friends or public figures you like on Mastodon and see what server they are on.

isn't the whole point of federated service that I don't have to be on the same server as people I'm following?

Of course. I only suggest that for people that cannot decide what server to choose.

If there's no wrong answer between Gmail and Outlook, why must you choose one of them?

You have a good analogy attempt there, but you didn't quite nail it I think, because Outlook is also an email client.

It's more like if someone asked why they need to choose between someone@gmail.com address or someone@outlook.com, but in reality email would work just fine regardless.

EDIT: fixed

Yup, you're right. I guess I was specifically referring to outlook.com, Microsoft's hosted email solution for consumers.

Except for all the people with outlook.com addresses.

The "not choosing" option is to run your own instance.

You are forced to chose because there is not a central blessed server that acts as a main hub.

You chose an area code for your phone number. Often people choose area codes from a home state as a bit of nostalgia or affinity, but in the end you can use any number to talk to any number, so it really does not matter much.

In Mastodon you can choose a french server if you are french and agree with generally accepted french values of moderation, or you can choose a general purpose server, or host your own.

There are a lot of LGBT servers and special interest servers with strict moderation, and general purpose servers that moderate very little.

It is also a bit like choosing what city to live in... except it is -much- easier to move if you decide you do not like the vibe and wish to live somewhere else. Mastodon has built-in user forwarding to take your follows and followers with you.

I’ve never been given a choice for my area code, and if I was, there’s the obvious default to “where I live”. What’s the Mastodon equivalent?

There are many country and geographic specific mastodons.

I haven't figured out this part. I joined the default server years ago. All of the other servers want a unique account, as I cannot login using my existing account.

How do I "participate across the fediverse" without creating one account per server? Is there a part of the UI I just haven't stumbled on yet?

You cannot use your gmail credentials to login to yahoo, but you can communicate with anyone from yahoo with your gmail account.

Similarly servers do not share credentials, but you can follow people no matter what server they are on.

It's finding people to follow that are on different servers. That's the thing. A lot of servers have their content for users only, and if you don't have an account on those servers, you don't know who to follow.

there's a lot of chicken & egg issues still going on. I think it'll get better as more people put their info on their web pages, though.

The people come first, not the technology. I didn't really start using Twitter until I first knew some people I wanted to communicate with. It will be the same with Mastodon, or whatever. Then the choice of server will become much simpler. Until then, I'm not moving from Twitter. Sure I'm using Twitter less these days, due to the chaos, but I'm not joining anything else until I see where others are going.

Does that make me a sheeple? Yes, it does. Sue me.

Also, besides choosing a server, how do you figure out which other servers that server "federates" with or blocks entirely?

Many Mastodon servers list which other instances they block or limit. Check out the "Moderated servers" list at the bottom of https://mastodon.social/about

Live and learn? It astonishes me that people would get so worked up about the possibility that somebody somewhere is posting and you might not see it. Guess what? They're already posting today and you're not seeing their posts.

Oh, I have no intention or reason to move away from twitter. My interest ist purely theoretical.

You have a point, but think about it from the newbies perspective. They have no idea how many posts they won't see. Everybody is used to centralized where they see everything and now they're being told to check out this alternative where you might not see everything. Okay, does that mean 50% of what gets posted won't be seen? 25%? 5%? Will I be able to see what my favorite celeb posts? There's zero context for a newbie to understand what they're missing out on. Much easier to say "too complicated" than to give it a try.

Honestly, I think it's concern trolling. Newbies don't know federation is incomplete, so it's not a problem for them. It's only on the HN threads full of mastodon haters that the topic even gets mentioned, but these are not newbies. They're people looking for reasons to be unhappy.

Perhaps some are concern trolling, but I think it's still a legitimate problem if you want people to take up the technology. I use mastodon, but I know it's not the easiest thing to pick up. A lot of the complaining, to me, is just recognizing the common pattern of technically-minded creators not recognizing that the tech (and how it's presented) can get in the way of encouraging more users to join.

> Everybody is used to centralized where they see everything

You never see everything. There's way too much of it. Everything is going to be a selection. The question is who is going to do the selecting.

You don't see the risk of outsourcing your reach to a rando admin, who may have started their instance out of protest reasons, in a highly contentious, politicized climate?

There are people right now having tantrums because they want their one-sided censorship back, and indeed, that's what's behind this latest drive to promote mastodon all over the place.

Nothing has actually changed on Twitter except the bluechecks' sense that they're no longer a privileged class.

There are risks in trusting your instance admin, but you can move.

Tons has changed on Twitter, including the laying off of half the company including substantial numbers in the Trust & Safety team. I'm seeing people who couldn't have cared less about the US's culture wars talking about leaving Twitter and setting up Mastodon accounts because they're expecting the platform to become nastier, more spammy, less reliable, and overall less pleasant to be on. Perhaps they're wrong, but it's wrong to pretend they're all doing it because they're having 'tantrums' and want their 'one-sided censorship back'.

The major concern I've seen regarding the blue checks is that it's going from being a system of verification (this person really is who they claim to be) to one where it just represents having paid a subscription fee without any real identity verification at all.

Bluechecks stopped being about verification a long time ago, when it became clear Twitter wouldn't verify people with the wrong kind of opinions, and when they vindictively started to deverify accounts as punishment. That proves it was not about identity verification at all but about the in-group.

I have no doubt there is some hysteria going around, but it is entirely unfounded. If anything, you can expect fanatic lefties to false flag abuse to create that impression because that's exactly their style.

Oh please, actually notable conservatives and right wingers with impersonation risk have never had much trouble getting verified. All journalists from Fox News, Newsmax, etc were verified as were all GOP politicians.

Those complaining about not being verified were invariably non-notable internet famous personalities, and I saw many of those complaints from people on the left too. Not everything was political bias, some people just were far less notable than they thought they were.

That you consider this to be about ‘fanatical lefties’ and ‘false flags’ shows you’re way too far down the rabbit hole and you’ve lost all perspective. Step back from the culture war nonsense and maybe spend a bit of time offline to touch grass.

You're completely right, but you'll have a hard time finding common sense in HN. Go to 4chan if you want a real conversation.

Generally they seem to have lists of blocked servers (often with the full domain censored with ****) on the about page. I don't know if the list is generated or manually updated.

Most of the servers I've looked at today have that list hidden behind a signup wall. "The list is visible for logged-in members under the heading Unavailable content below."

and they aren't taking new signups. Soooo.... no idea.

You should join a server you think has a reasonable approach to moderating other servers. On any other service the administrator can also prevent you from seeing posts, this is not specific to Mastodon at all. For private messaging other standards exist, for example XMPP+OMEMO.

How do you find out if that is the case? Believe what they say? What happens if they die, or throw you out? Do you need to get another handle? Will this drop you from other people's contact lists?

These are things I worry about.

If these are your concerns you may be well served by hosting an instance on a domain you own.

Am I the only one who doesn't get why chosing a server is necesary? I just don't get it at all from a user experience perspective.

Do we need to pick servers with Bittorrent? no. Just tell it what file you want (magnet link).

Do we need to pick servers with Tox? no. Just tell it what friend you want to talk to (contact ID).

Or to pick a centralized example: do we need to pick a server on Twitter? no. duh.

Then why is there any necesity or excuse ever to have to pick servers for "social" apps? Is this the 80's?!

How do these "decentralized" advocates think they can get away with a "harder to use app with more steps"? Especially when it's not a technical necesity?

You need to pick servers (providers) for emails. But we don't really think about it this much because we're used to it.

The fediverse is built on a very similar type of network: federated servers, similarly to how gmail talks to yahoo and hotmail.

You also have to pick a phone or email provider. Would you prefer if those had only a single option available?

You don't pick a server with Bittorrent because it runs locally, which you can also do with Mastodon or other distributed networks. Though if you want others to be able to reach you, you probably need to set up a domain name and leave your server on. The problem with using a Bittorrent-like setup is that you don't have a persistent identity there.

You don't need to pick a server for Twitter because there is only one. You have no choice. Mastodon and other distributed social networks offer choice. Imagine, if you didn't like how Twitter moderated their content, and you thought you could do that better, you could simply spin up your own Twitter server and still communicate with everybody on Twitter?

But you're right that being forced to make this choice on little information is still an extra step, and not a great one. Maybe there should be a single default choice? Maybe assign one randomly for those who don't know? Because it honestly doesn't matter that much which server you pick. You can still see and follow everything. The only difference is really the moderation/blocking policy. Just pick a big one and you're probably fine.

from @SilverEagle@pony.social People treating cell phones like they treat Mastodon: "ok...so you're saying I get a phone number, but I have to pick a provider? wtf that sounds like work...but I can call you even if you're using a different one, because they all talk to each other? so f*ing confused rn"

> apparently my server's administrator would be able to silently prevent me from seeing other "enemy" servers' messages, and they could even read my DMs.

There's an interesting problem here - how do you know that your server's software and configuration hasn't been modified in a way that subtly lets these things happen?

I've always wanted a PaaS, operated by a too-big-to-make-exceptions security-hardened company (here's looking at you, Google!), that lets you deploy any image or set of images, but has a centrally managed ingress that ensures that the only access is over HTTPS (so no direct access to any requisitioned databases) and furthermore reports a hash of the image(s) as an HTTP response header with every single response, with no way to change or suppress this

You could then have, say, a Mastodon implementation that also reports all appropriate central configuration (say, blocklists, or disabling the ability of users to port out) at a public endpoint, and, importantly, is trusted to report that accurately, because you could validate what code it's running via the HTTP response. You could audit that security updates are being applied, that nobody is running a fork that gives them access to your DMs, and, if Mastodon gave visibility into this, you could also validate whether administrators all have 2FA enabled and how many of them there are (and hold your server admins to account socially).

Of course, you do have to trust the PaaS provider not to make exceptions to the rules, but no more so than we currently trust any certificate authority.

Does anyone know if anything like this exists right now?

IMO, I should be directed to a federal-level or provincial-level provider for my primary id. And it should be easy to select a “better” one later, as I learn about the service.

Or better if I could buy a plug-n-play wall wart that would provide a secure server for friends and family, with some way to filter/receive the rest of the fediverse.

Maybe I’m the oddball but I care way more about twittering with/to friends and family, than following a celeb or journalist.

> and they could even read my DMs.

Child patents are strangely completely ignoring this point for some reason. Some have added an absurd “but what about email” though. I never thought about it. This ought to be DoA for many in today’s world.

It is a lot like email. There is no centralized email network either. Ultimately, people will realize that they are really looking for a specific community rather than joining "Mastodon" itself.

I think you're just putting way too much thought into it: Any server will do just fine (you can always move later, but only if you feel really attached to a given community), and any well-established server really just blocks servers full of Nazis and anime child porn.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com