Mastodon is not ready for me | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is not ready for me

blog.bofh.it

16 pointsedward20 comments

> that there is still no way to migrate an account to a different instance without basically starting from scratch.

That's not true though. When you migrate the account, your follows and followers migrate too. (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/)

> I do not think that it would be wise for me to spend time developing a so cial network identity on somebody else's instance which could disappear at any t ime.

Meanwhile in the sidebar:

https://www.linux.it/~md/, https://people.debian.org/~md/, My Twitter page. My LinkedIn profile.

I can't tell if this is a troll or not.

Of course not. The internet rewards the confidently incorrect.

From my understanding, migration of a Mastodon account requires cooperation of the original server. If tomorrow your homeserver goes offline without notice and never comes back you're SOL.

>> that there is still no way to migrate an account to a different instance without basically starting from scratch.

> That's not true though. When you migrate the account, your follows and followers migrate too. (https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/)

So, that's a clear win for Mastodon because on Twitter there is really no way to migrate an account without starting from scratch. Also people complain all the time that their accounts got suspended on Twitter.

The issue is that many believe their @name on Mastodon works the same as their @-Twitter handle. They follow different rules but both are not suitable to build a permanent online identity on.

Your followers migrate, but your posts and any interactions on them don't. And for good reason, of course! But I do understand where the author is coming from: if you've put in a lot of effort in your posts thus-far, it does still feel like leaving a lot behind when you switch servers. Your post history is much more of your identity on social media than your followers are.

The migration process between managed instances is quite trivial.

Back in the day I remember getting DMs from people I know saying "I just migrated to Foo, can you please follow me again?".

Recently, a few people I know migrated and I was pleasantly surprised that there was nothing required from my side, I was automatically following them on the new instances.

> That's not true though.

It is true. Your posts are not copied.

They say: you can just join any instance, and then it's easy to switch later. But it's not.

Yep, this person nails the primary issue. Distributed or federated social networking won’t take off until we have a worthwhile self-sovereign identity solution, aka BYOID (Bring Your Own Identity), where the sole controller of the identity is the individual with the private key.

It’s a very difficult problem to solve and to turn into something easy to use for the masses… but it’s required for such applications as Mastodon to truly be enticing.

As-is, we should not expect Mastodon (or similar systems) to gain much traction outside of a few niches.

> where the sole controller of the identity is the individual with the private key

Counterpoint: People at large don't care about managing credentials the same way IT geeks do. The federated approach with admins and "lost password" flow helps adoption more than something like Scuttlebutt does. Private key as identity means "lose this and your identity is irrecoverable".

We've seen this play out many times with people losing significant amounts of money in crypto. We'd see many more mistakes with low stakes social networks.

I think similar. My take it that a DNS equivalent service needs to accept anyone to register a public key, for free : IE allow anyone to register [public key].subdomain.domain.com

And the registration/update tests you have the private key for that.

But: 1. as sibling comment noted. We need really good key management for that too.

2. how to run such a service with all the complications (like trolls trying to brute force register everything they can)

3. how to fund it

Then everyone hosts their own anything. As an app on their phone. As a server at home or ISP or dedicated hosting service.

The admin problem is real. We stood up a small instance using a canned image on vultr.com but I would not want to do much with it manually. It’s typical modern Rube Goldberg machine software. Few developers know how to code software that is nice to install and maintain anymore.

I blame Docker to a great extent. Docker made it easier to ship and manage giant balls of hair and chewing gum, encouraging developers to say “fuck it” and stop caring about cleanliness or consistency.

Mastodon isn’t bad on the front end though.

pretty sure mastodon is a bog standard Rails app

The instance we're running came with six docker containers and apparently includes Redis and something called "sidekiq" and Elasticsearch.

Without Docker setting this thing up would be painful and would require the setup of multiple pieces of infrastructure. I am a bit concerned about how painful it will be to maintain, upgrade, or fix if it breaks.

> Few developers know how to code software that is nice to install and maintain anymore.

NetBSD is refreshing for precisely this reason. I'm not sure why it doesn't get more love tbh, it's not glitzy but goddamn that's how you code.

Oh, it is not ready for you so we should all just sit on our hands until this person blesses it.

This shouldn't have been flagged.

While the specific way this was presented may be a little ascerbic, , the underlying complaint behind it is sound.

A large majority of the world is fine with their identity being e.g somename@gmail.com, but the more technical among us choose to explicitly own not just the first bit, but the second bit. E.g. myname@myname.com for sound reasons. The reality is that we don't always care where that resolves to (fastmail / protonmail / google domains), because the namespace is portable.

Popular Mastodon instances like mastodon.social or chaos.social have closed registration currently. masto.host a service to host your own (payed) instance doesn't accept new customers for now.

Apparently many people have enough confidence that Mastodon is ready for them that at least they give it a try. That's good.

What is Mastadon / Fediverse? I read the intros and wikipedias, but I still don't get it.

It's a meme. there is no such thing as federation. when every server is hosted on infrastructure owned by a few big tech companies. theres nothing federated at all about any of it. only way federation or decentralization can work is if everyone is hosting nodes from home. but people don't want to do that so...

Check out fediverse.party for other tools in this space.

Federateable software like Mastodon (twitter alternative), PeerTube (youtube alternative), Plemora (tumblr alternative), Lemmy (reddit alternative), etc is software where anyone with a server can host their own "instance" of the software. A key to them is some kind of protocol that allows different instances to talk to each other

If you disagree with the way Twitter is being run and you decide to run your own version of Twitter you'd have to start from scratch and be at a huge disadvantage due to the network effect. However, in the fediverse, this isn't as much of a problem since you can simply follow other instances

I believe that usually "Fediverse" is reserved for software where that central protocol is ActivityPub, but there are other non-AP-based examples of federated software out there

One big player in this space is FramaSoft which is a French company dedicated to "deGooglizing" the internet and creating working, mature, FLOSS, alternatives. They've increasingly supported more federated projects in the Fediverse

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