Mastodon server maintenance: The Queues down in Queueville | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon server maintenance: The Queues down in Queueville

community.hachyderm.io

62 pointsfragmede37 comments

I editorialized the title by prepending "Mastodon server maintenance:" to the original title because I didn't think the original title gave enough context.

Though this led me to believe this was a boring status update with a punny title, when in fact it's a work of festive poetic beauty:

> John Mastodon took the queue hash, and up the chimney he stuck it.

> The Hachyderm crew was too tired to fill out the report and said “fuck it”.

very very nice....

i've been following the devs closely for the last few weeks and it is fascinating to see them hack together fixes and document each step (i fail to do so every often)

would it be possible for them to look for a second "pleroma/akkoma" server which should be significantly better than mastodon in terms of resources utilization and user scaling-up.

> would it be possible for them to look for a second "pleroma/akkoma" server

Soapbox[1] is probably the most mature alternative to Mastodon, but the general consensus seems to be that it can't be used because most users of Mastodon don't align with the Soapbox creator's view on politics.

[1] https://soapbox.pub/

In fairness, this is also the case with Pleroma (and is largely why Akkoma exists).

> but the general consensus seems to be that it can't be used because most users of Mastodon don't align with the Soapbox creator's view on politics

This is vague and wasn't immediately obvious to me. What I found online is that there's some kerfuffle over him saying he's not supporting trans rights at the expense of biological women's rights. Did I misunderstand the position or did I capture it accurately?

please help me understand, why is that "stand" supposed to influence your or my decision to use or not use their software? its not like WE HAVE TO SUBSCRIBE to their views before installation like those terms and conditions?

are we saying a "developer who says bad things about trans people has made bad software and should be avoided like the plague"

I guess the idea is that by giving them success you're allowing them to broadcast their opinion to more and more people. At least that's my read on it.

Given how big a part trans people have played in the creation of ActivityPub, I get why you would want to avoid people like this in the scene.

Avoiding people in your community (i.e. your Mastodon instance) is fine. Trying to keep people away from using a protocol (ActivityPub) is insane.

The Mastodon-compatible alternative I'm looking at the most is Takahe: https://github.com/jointakahe/takahe/

Its goal is to be lightweight and able to run on low resources and serverless infra. It also supports multi-domain multi-identity. Built on Django.

I am running it as of yesterday and it shows a _lot_ of promise. I took it entirely the other way (test instance on a Pi with SQLite) and it is just purring along, although I haven’t yet put any significant load on it (that will likely happen once 0.6 is released and there is better client support).

The about page says it's agpl3. Which doesn't impose any requirements about users having the same politics as the author.

Tell that to average Mastodon user.

what has "software"do do with views of creators? i find this unsettling that people are choosing between projects not based on merits, is one faster, less resource hungry, in a safer language, is compatible with standards, is easy to use or manage or update, can be modified or not, can be piped with other software or not but no. people are concerned about "views of one developer/team".....

so what has "Soapbox creator's view on politics." got to do with "Soapbox[1] is probably the most mature alternative to Mastodon". you are saying both things in one sentence yourself.

if soapbox is mature alternative, use it. why should there be a "general consensus" to avoid it?

A piece of social networking software that gets popular does bring a certain audience/reach to its creator. So "The software is good but I don't want the views of its creator to reach a broader audience" is a valid stance as far as I'm concerned.

> A piece of social networking software that gets popular does bring a certain audience/reach to its creator.

Does it? I have no idea who created Mastodon.

You don't? https://time.com/6229230/mastodon-eugen-rochko-interview/

The name didn't seem to be prominently reported until the Twitter exodus lately. I was surprised he's my countryman, I think I would have remembered had he come up in the earlier Mastodon discussions on HN. I always assumed it's a mostly American thing.

> The name didn't seem to be prominently reported until the Twitter exodus lately

But that kind of proves my point now doesn't it? When "his" platform became popular he got featured on the national press. I can totally see that some people do not want to offer that kind of platform to someone with whom they disagree politically.

> But that kind of proves my point now doesn't it?

Yes.

Soapbox isn't any more mature than Pleroma or Akkoma in terms of software.

It's a hostile fork of Pleroma that regularly merges upstream patches from Pleroma. The lead developer, Alex Gleason, got kicked off of the Pleroma project when he called other contributors names for reverting a patch he made that introduced code smell[0]. Said patch was controversial at the time of introduction, but got bludgeoned into being merged because Gleason was by far the most active contributor. It was removed with consensus when other developers became more active, although from what I can tell, Gleason didn't bother to participate in that discussion.

Soapbox is his "taking the ball and going home" answer.

If you want a non-technical reason to avoid it/consider it immature; Gleason cried "cancel culture" when removed from the Pleroma project, even though it pretty much has nothing to do with it. He's a demagogue who used his getting removed from the project to further advocate for his own political beliefs (which is being a TERF). This in particular means that the overwhelming majority of Soapbox instances tend to be maintained by the people that think that Pleroma is maintained by the people Gleason dislikes[1], to the point where some instances automatically defederate from instances using Soapbox's frontend[2].

[0]: Pleroma uses a RESTful API for routing. Gleason wanted to add a bunch of alternative endpoints for no other reason than "this is what users are familiar with on Twitter and my frontend for Pleroma wants to rely on those". The patches were reverted eventually on the simple reason that they're cruft.

[1]: Which is extremely funny considering an early criticism of the Pleroma project was that due to it being easy to host, it wound up hosting a lot of instances that would fit this bill. Now most of those migrated to using Soapbox.

[2] Funny for the exact same reason as [1].

Can we agree at least that Soapbox is a much better frontend (as in, it is more suited as a Twitter-alternative, more user-friendly and relies on UX/UI that is more familiar to the general audience) than whatever crap is the default FE from Pleroma?

Alex is also the first one to push for Quoted objects. None of the Pleroma devs wanted, the Mastodon devs even less. Now that Mastodon is reaching some semblance of mainstream, I am seeing every day someone writing about how QT is the one feature they miss from Twitter. For everyone that responds with "Soapbox has it, you should take a look", there will be at least 3 others saying "Soapbox is developed by a TERF, stay away from it".

Not really? Soapbox in my experience is a bloated javascript mess that breaks loading half the time because it triggers my adblocker.

Pleroma-FE is honestly pretty decent compared to the other UIs out there, but I recognize that this is a matter of taste. It's simple, it's efficient, it knows what it wants to look like and it doesn't look like someone took a mobile interface and blew it up for a wider viewport/slapdashed mouse support onto it. That alone makes it better than 90% of the social media sites out there. I personally do prefer it over Masto-FE, but I've never been one for the Tweetdeck style interface.

As for quoted objects; Mastodon doesn't want it because Gargron (no comment, that's just the kinda project Mastodon is, feel free to imagine a rant on BDFLs though). Pleromas current chief developer is from what I can tell awaiting a spec change to be implemented before doing anything with it (which... fair enough, Mastodon just repurposes the spec for its own use and it's aggravating as hell) and has been critical of the proposed spec change because it's poor in semantics. Misskey from what I can tell supports it out of the box and it's support for it predates Soapbox-BEs implementation.

Quoted objects are technically somewhat complex if you don't want them to inherit certain issues that are both endemic to using AP as a protocol and the issues with the Twitter specific implementation.

Considering Gleasons general tedency to just copy Twitter stuff without forethought makes me probably not wrong in assuming that Gleason didn't bother thinking this through and it most likely has all those issues.

Your argument is based mostly based on an engineer perspective, perhaps you could benefit from looking at the product perspective a bit?

Take the ~2M people that are leaving Twitter this week and show them (a) Mastodon, (b) Pleroma with the default FE and (c) Soapbox/Rebased. How do you think the split would go?

Whatever issues are there on Soapbox, they could be fixed if the developers had the proper support, while you can give all the support in the world to Mastodon and we will never have QT.

Probably Mastodon. When people are outside of their wheelhouse (and technology wise most people are), they pick what everyone else is moving to. Mastodon is the media darling of the fediverse, for better and for worse.

The press has been hyping up Mastodon since 2016 on tech sites and even the general press only ever talks about Mastodon. Pleroma, Misskey and all the various offshoots are practical footnotes in terms of userbases (the only one with real usage is really Glitch-soc which is a Mastodon fork that exists to circumvent Gargrons BDFL tendencies). It sucks but that's how it is.

As for the issues on Soapbox; this argument also works for Pleroma. With proper support, Pleroma was, and arguably still is (although now moreso because everyone else is even sloppier), be the best software to use the fediverse with. It even supports different frontends, including Soapbox if you really wanted it.

I agree that Mastodon is a technical dead end for some features like QTs because Gargron is a BDFL who just doesn't want those features and imposes that on the project, but it's absurd to suggest that Soapbox is the best answer, when it's largely just a spite driven fork of Pleroma that is mostly picked for ideological reasons when admins aren't simply clueless about the projects history and offers basically no feature benefits. I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.

> I encourage devs to put their time into Pleroma instead; more people benefit from that, especially considering Rebased just imports all changes from it's upstream anyway.

For the end user, none of that matters much in comparison with the ability of just making a quote-tweet. You and Alex can continue having your fights; as an user and as someone running a commercial provider for AP software all I really want is to have software that can be used by people in a way that they want and that respects their freedoms. My feeling as an outsider is that the Mastodon devs are too stuck in their own ideology and the Pleroma devs are too focused on their own (techno-libertarian) audience. Alex seems to be the only one that, in his words, "just want to bring the normies to the Fediverse".

Ariadne at Treehouse (who was in fact an early Pleroma developer) has quote-toots in Mastodon in live testing, with an eye to compatibility with the Misskey and Akkoma implementations, and she's done many years on the social sides of the issues with QTs and social software in general so I expect it won't suck. (I'm on a glitch-soc instance and my admin wants to add the Treehouse implementation as soon as it's done.)

so the Fediverse is interpreting Website Boy as damage and routing around him

> Fediverse is interpreting Website Boy as damage and routing around him

Funny that this comment works for both Eugen or Alex.

Being a 'TERF' probably means one has a healthy stance on censorship and free speech, and an ability to cut past the bullshit and see and say things for how they really are. So that just sounds like a point in favour to me.

How did we end up conflating viewpoints with positions onfree speech?

Disliking trans people does not mean supporting free speech. Now I'm expecting you to rattle off some examples of trans people expressing views contrary to free speech.

That's true, but TERFS have as well. So what's the point?

There are usually two (or more) sides to the story. Here's the developer's own take:

https://blog.alexgleason.me/pleroma-is-dead/

https://www.heterodorx.com/podcast/episode-69-fediverse-foll...

I'm most amazed Gleason thought that made him look other than terrible.

I run GoToSocial on my home server and, being written in Golang and not Ruby, it hardly consumes any CPU or RAM. I think we will see a couple of ActivityPub server projects being built with Go an possibly Rust the next couple of years that will make hosting much simpler and less resource intensive.

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