Scaling Mastodon in the face of an exodus
nora.codes
nora.codes
I'm all for experimentation, but since "the exodus" I've become acutely aware of how many instances are out there advertising their version number[1], so the first big rails (or mastodon itself) vuln is going to be some ooooonooooz
1: although in this case, it says a version but the "Source Code" link points to the wrong repo, so .. security by obscurity I guess?
It's great. This is how it should be. And it's a huge improvement over open source projects that languish for years for lack of strong leadership with no one forking it because there's no one to say no to features. As long as the possibility exists, people are wary of forking. Remove the possibility, and people can feel confident doing their own take.
As for Mastodon, as far as I know all the major forks are maintained by experienced developers who incorporate security updates.
But at the same time I think it's eroding Twitter's seriousness, and soon Elon's Twitter may be as uncool as Zuck's Facebook.
- Get quick press releases (from the real press, but also from other sources)
- Be able to, let's call it politely, "interact" with politians and celebrities.
If too many celebrities leave feature 2 could be killed, it remains to be seen if increased openness in feature 1 would be enough to compensate.
Oh no!
Or Twitter refugees migrate to Jack’s new Blue Sky service.
... since one cannot join a protocol spec. Although it's certainly possible that this Mastodon exodus will help Blue Sky (if|when) it does launch because NPR has already started airing stories about distributed social media
Is anyone aware of an org that hosts an instance but is also putting work into the governance side?
I agree that you should seek more open governance, at least transparent finances and active open source, (technically that's covered by AGPL), because otherwise the server could go at any time, and it violates the spirit of federation in the first place.
Here's a nice transparency report: https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/
So I currently run a single-user instance of Mastodon. Wondering if it's possible to start running a single-user instance of Pleroma instead, without having to change the username+domain?
Like merely keeping the same name and domain is easy enough. Just shut down the old system, start the new one, create an account with the same name. Of course you would need to refollow everyone. I'm not sure what happens to your followers. Your new server will not know they are followers, so unless this triggers mastodon to try to automatically refollow, I think they are left in a half-broken state. You definitely lose all your old content. All in all, this is not really a great option.
For a full migration where in theory everything works, you could try to follow the linked process to migrate to Pleroma 2.0.5, and then obviously just upgrade to latest following plemora documentation for upgrading. description of migration process: https://icyphox.sh/blog/mastodon-to-pleroma/ (This is based on the following migrator: https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/migrator). I have no idea if it works with newer mastodon minor releases.
It could be possible that Pleroma is not very idiomatic Elixir / OTP.
RabbitMQ has been my message bus of choice for over a decade. Configuration is a total PITA, but it's a one-time thing. Otherwise, it's been rock solid and I'll happily continue to use.
Well, that in short explains why Pleroma/Elixir is a much better stack to build this in. You don't need Sidekiq (https://sipsandbits.com/2020/08/07/do-we-need-background-job...) and you aren't stuck with a GIL (Global Interpreter Lock).
But you don't need that. It's certainly a nice-to-have.
As someone who has extensive experience in both elixir and ruby, and mastodon itself, no this is doesn't.
[1]: https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.h...
I discard remote posts after 120 days, and my database (using PostgreSQL 15, no RUM indexes) takes up just over 5.4 GB (as reported by `pg_database_size`). It's grown a lot faster in the past couple of weeks. I follow 245 accounts.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/delightful-fediverse-apps
I'm partial to WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin and would highly recommend pushing for inclusion of core AP functionality into your content management system of choice (so everyone can just stand up and participate on their own domain name, like media/gov/your local school etc).
Mastodon itself is fun but the real value in the fedi is going to be diversity of interoperable (or even incompatible) implementations. There (on a long enough timeline) will be a successor to Masto's fedi domination.
Mastodon doesn't have a snowflakes chance in hell of becoming the de facto Twitter replacement if they don't change that process to a normal, near-instant sign up process that users have come to expect from every other service.
Make the "choosing server" nonsense come after account creation. Ffs.
EDIT: Geez, I get it, there are a lot of Mastodon fanboys that have zero interest in the success of Mastodon as a Twitter replacement. Which is fine, since it never will be with it's current onboarding process.
You choose a service (server) and then sign up there. The sign up belongs to a server, not the server to the sign up. You can't ring a door bell before picking a door first. ;)
Now, you may see it differently and want to offer an explanation. I'm sure your explanation would be coherent and rational. But your explanation means nothing to the average user. They click 'sign up' and expect to sign up and get to using this new website called Mastodon they heard about. And when they realize it's not that simple, many will abandon the process. It's a simple as that.
The term "Mastodon" means, to most people, either "a website just like Twitter " or, more likely, absolutely nothing.
Is that difference, and the barrier it presents to new users, somehow unclear?
You keep saying "users" when you should probably just say "I," but maybe you understand it a bit better at this point. The onboarding UX is atrocious, mostly because people want it to be something it's not, and partly because developers often don't do UX well. But the UX isn't going to change, so focusing on helping people understand how and why it works the way it does seems more important than cursing the design.
You're welcome to stick with Twitter, Inc, if you want a single oligarch to control your chosen microblogging service and everything about it. Or you can venture out and pick a server that supports the mastodon service instead.
And who knows? Maybe someday a big company will grow a giant mastodon server so that something like 30% of all mastodon traffic happens there, just as with Gmail and email traffic[0] today.
The email service of your choice is the "server" you've chosen. If you go directly to a mastodon instance (the "server") the sign-up process won't require you to choose a server.
Chose a server:
1) GMail
2) Yahoo! Mail
3) Outlook
etc...
> I can sign up for an email right now with a dozen different services and not one will make me complete a mysterious task like "choosing a server"
You absolutely, 100% had to "choose a server" for your email.
To the average user, how do you decide between Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Outlook?
This is 100% analogous, except Mastodon also makes it nearly trivial to change your server, with no effort taken by anyone who is already communicating with you. It's literally easier than an email server migration.
Once upon a time, you had to go to a college that had been invited to The Facebook, in order for you to get an account.
The beginnings of new things are always complicated.
We all learned the difference between .com, .edu., .co, .uk eventually...
I also think you're forgetting that most people had no idea what "The Information Super-Highway" was, and had no understanding of what an "ISP" was or why they needed to pay a monthly fee to access free content. And tie up their phone line.
People who were on AOL thought they were on the Internet. And Compuserve. Delphi. Prodigy. GEnie.
This is not a new problem.
But it's not like you could just make an Internet account, and just pay them. You HAD to use a federated ISP. And some of those ISPs tried to be Walled Gardens, with a weird side-door that ALSO let you get to "The Internet," but that was mostly porn and weirdos.
Yes, people might be expecting a single corporate entity called "Mastodon, Inc," but that's why the (very poor) analogy to email is bandied about. You have to pick a service provider in order to use email (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc), and you have to pick a service provider in order to use mastodon, too.
Twitter, Inc, is the single provider of the twitter service, but that's falling apart because there's no way for the twitter service to route around the damage being done by Twitter, Inc's new owner.
Gmail, Outlook, iCloud… nobody picked a server.
And certainly there was no concern that if I pick the “wrong” one, I may not be able to receive email from one of the other big providers.
Oh, there certainly was no concern I might end on a email server with an ideology I don’t agree with.
I get your intent - that people don't understand what federation means. But you're completely ignoring that we all live with federated email servers. Federated cell phone carriers, too, for that matter.
This is honestly not that different.
I 100% get what your intent is, but you seem to 100% not get that this sentence was completely false:
> I can sign up for an email right now with a dozen different services and not one will make me complete a mysterious task like "choosing a server"
And the same way that you can't "create your email account first, and then pick a server later," is the same exact reason you can't "create your Mastodon account first, and then pick your server later."
It's literally the same reason.
And you still seem to be completely rejecting that concept. As though this is "just bad UX." It's fundamental to how both e-mail and Mastodon work.
They can't "fix it," the way you wish they could.
Sure, they might come up with something, but it would be inherently worse at some really important things it's trying to do. It wants to be federated. Just like email. And you seem to not have any understanding of that.
AND to be -mad- at the people who are trying to help you understand. As though we're purposefully wasting your time.
You know who wants to see Mastodon as a Twitter replacement ? Not Mastodon users, and not fediverse inhabitants. It's all the Twitter serfs who want to find a new place where they will be taken care of. Except that place doesn't exist in the Fediverse.
For some reason people keep complaining about Mastodon not being easy enough, but it's the same people who believe they are expert enough to speak in the name of non-experts. It gets tiring to hear them.
So instead of telling people "sign up for mastodon," if it make you feel better, tell them to "sign up for X" where X is one of the ten servers I mentioned in my mastodon explainer post[0], none of which are aimed specifically at tech-savvy people.
There are people who do not know how to read any written language, at all, who use Smartphones on a daily basis. They learn how to navigate the icons, without any ability to read.
I think you have no memory of what it used to be like to put an app on your iPhone. Over-The-Air installs and updates didn't happen at first. People had to use iTunes on a Desktop, with a cord plugged in, to do stuff.
My 90 year old grandmother knew how to get into the App Store, install apps, and set up accounts.
I think you're vastly underestimating the number of steps users will go through to get at something good.
So, please, think about that for a moment.
But more importantly, if I send you an invite to the same Mastodon server I'm on, you literally skip the one and only one new step ("pick a server") that you've spent all of this time and energy complaining about.
Yup.
The thing you've been bemoaning this entire time isn't even an issue, if you get an invite link.
And frankly, that's probably how the majority of eventual Mastodon users will actually get there - by following a link a friend sends them.
Have a great weekend.
But when they make it based on a flawed claim, like, "I can get an email account without first picking a server," don't you think it's better if they understand that their claim was false?
Where would you like these account credentials to be stored? Imagination land?
Yes, it's different. People will get over it.
You're not getting downvoted because everyone who disagrees with you is a strawman (sorry, "fanboy"), you're getting downvoted because your premise is shaky and every time someone points out an existing ecosystem where federation is normal you claim it doesn't count.
On the other hand, as a result of this design, no number of oligarchs can run the mastodon network into the ground, so there are obviously trade-offs.
Many mastodon servers do, in fact, have a normal, near-instant sign-up process, although given the huge influx of users, many have switched to manually approve registrations in an effort to control load/costs and keep moderation manageable.
Also, while yes federated etc etc, I for sure get a lot more enjoyment from the "Local Timeline" in my server than trying to keep up with the absolute firehose of "Federated Timeline" which is another reason to pick one where the local content would be interesting