Mastodon is doomed? | Hacker News Reader

Mastodon is doomed?

justingarrison.com

252 pointsbpierre326 comments

The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc.

We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic centralized social media platforms, but if we peek over our recency bias, we can see that it wasn't always that way.

But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is there. No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people, or to follow 20 different celebrities they like.

There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.

Admin/Veteran of small social networks over the last 30 years here. Yes there are.

Definitely—there are so many thriving fora that were around before Facebook, and will be full of activity long after Meta has been delisted.

There’s this thing called IRC…

Nope it's a side-effect of the current business model which is to monetize attention at the biggest scale possible.

It may be the whole appeal for you but for others it's a deterrent.

> There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.

Just because you're not on them doesn't mean they don't exist.

I wouldn't namedrop the ones I like here because I like them the way they are, but consider: there are so many 100-200 member Discords with consistent and vibrant communities.

They're not trying to become hypermassive cash engines, but that's okay and even good. That's a grim way to exist.

> there are so many 100-200 member Discords with consistent and vibrant communities

Slack has a free tier too.

90-days of history only, is as much a feature as it is a bug. Idle "off-the record" talk with current and/or ex colleagues in a bar after work isn't recorded indefinitely, why should the online equivalent?

To have actual off the record, you need disappearing messages (and trust for your colleagues) like in Signal. Not simply paywalled messages.

Oh sure, the message history past 90 days is safe only from casual inquiry, not a determined adversary. it's like the first kind of cryptography not the second (1)

I'll take suggestions for a better (easy, cheap or free, functional, familiar) small community platform?

1) https://libquotes.com/bruce-schneier/quote/lbx8x8g

It isn't "90 days of history". It's 90 days of history you can see. Slack retains it indefinitely.

I know the small ones exist, and I use many, they’re often much better than Twitter for specialist interests (HN is just one example). But I also scroll through Twitter daily, for something the small ones can’t provide: it’s the big one where ‘everyone’ is.

You're literally describing the way forums, messageboards, mailing lists and everything worked before Twitter and Facebook came along. Yes, people can and will handle more than the absolute minimum social complexity just fine.

And Mastodon in particular will let you follow people on whatever instance you happen to use. "Checking 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people" is hyperbole, not reality.

> You're literally describing the way forums, messageboards, mailing lists and everything worked before Twitter and Facebook came along

Yes. And while the GP was hyberbolic, I think what we saw is that a large %age of people preferred one stop shopping.

Speaking for myself, the thing I love(d) the most about Twitter was the consolidation. It effectively replaced a bunch of message boards, online sites, and other things I would check throughout the day. One site gave me banter with friends, talking shop with professional acquaintances, weather, news, gossip, etc.

The people who were first online didn't represent the average person. Everyone's online now, it used to be a bunch of geeks and weirdos back then. I'm nostalgic as well but the times have changed.

This is very ahistorical. There's long been consumer non-geek friendly online services. The typical AOL user in the 90s wasn't a geek by any means. They used chat rooms, instant messaging, and mailing lists via the user friendly AOL interface.

Facebook has long provided a user-friendly interface for non-geek users. It's filled with non-geeks generating content.

While the Internet has always had a geek contingent it hasn't been the exclusive domain of geeks for nearly thirty years.

I talk to my close friends by text, discord, and steam chat. I talk to my coworkers by LinkedIn and slack. I talk to my family by phone, email, and text. Some are on signal some are not.

It's quite normal.

> There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.

Fun to see this posted on a pretty niche but very active site which covers probably a small proportion of your social circle.

Many people want just that, but there is likely no overlap between them and someone following celebrities on social media.

Maybe for the recent idea of social network. But back in the 2000', a lot of "social network" were IRC server/channel and forums. And they were often small and meant for a specific community/hobby/interest.

The idea of a social network where almost all of your friend and family are on, is really something that started in the 2020'.

In many way, Mastodon is just the phpBB of the 2020', with the added benefit that you could connect to other phpBB instances.

And even though hosting your own phpBB instance or IRC/TeamSpeak/Mumble server kinda fell out of favor due to Reddit and Discord, they also kind of act in the same way. Sure you have one login to access all the community instead of having to have a separate account for each, but each community are their own bubble and can moderate however they like. It is not a "worlwide forum" like twitter or instagram.

You're speaking of a time when the Internet itself wasn't really thriving - it was barely a curiosity that didn't exist in the lives of the vast majority of people in the world in any way at all.

With all of their downsides, it's only huge social networks that actually brought the vast majority of people to the internet at all.

> You're speaking of a time when the Internet itself wasn't really thriving - it was barely a curiosity that didn't exist in the lives of the vast majority of people in the world in any way at all.

It was thriving for me, and I was barely a teenager at the time.

Many of us software devs are a different sort.

> But back in the 2000', a lot of "social network" were IRC server/channel and forums. And they were often small and meant for a specific community/hobby/interest.

I was never a heavy IRC user, but yeah back in the 00s, especially the earlier two-thirds, I had several different forums on my browser hotbar that I’d make the rounds through a couple of times each day.

Kind of miss that honestly, each forum was its own unique beast with an entirely different set of personalities without also being polarized. Contrast that to modern social networks which have a samey grey-paste quality unless one seeks out highly polarized services, which are often too caustic to spend time in without risking becoming similarly caustic yourself.

> The idea of a social network where almost all of your friend and family are on, is really something that started in the 2020'.

I would disagree with the timing here. I think the peak "everyone on one network" was Facebook in the early 2010's and since then the market has splintered to other social networks, sometimes along generational lines, others based on use case.

Yes absolutely, I fucked up and wanted to write 2010

There is a "vibrancy" to social networks that are growing that is difficult to quantify or even explain. I'm still on IRC, I'm still on some phpbbs that the average age of the users must be somewhere in the middle 50s, and which might get 10 new sign ups every year. They started out big, but the attrition is much greater than any growth (I doubt that most of the new signups even stick around).

That's why social networks seem so magical early on, not only is everyone you like maybe on them, but there will be new people in the next week, month, or year that you'll like too. New things and new ideas are possible. But at some point, this turns sour. Eternal September describes that phenomenon, I think, but doesn't explain it well.

In some unfortunate networks, I think the latter can come even before the former (preempting it, making it impossible). You don't ever get the golden age.

Mastadon looks alot like this. Ignoring the politics, it looks alot like Voat did, and all the "we didn't learn the lessons of Voat" reddit alternatives that came after. It's almost as if you can't build a social network as a refugee tent city and make anything that anyone wants. Maybe that's the problem. In such a place where everyone is fleeing, there is nothing new there. It's all the same old people who were at the last place with you, there is nothing new about it.

Ever heard of Hacker News?

Those social networks are all sitting on top of the same internet, and everybody is on the internet (e.g. there's no reason why different social networks shouldn't be able to integrate with each other).

(I shudder in horror to think what email would look like if it was invented today by some Silicon Valley techbro startup - interoperability somehow isn't even considered as an option anymore)

> But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is there. No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people, or to follow 20 different celebrities they like.

The nice thing about a federated system is that it's ONE app to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people.

The realit is no such network that can brag that everyone is there. The biggest one, Facebook, doesn't even have a third of the total population on earth as active users.

Twitter, that we all love to talk about, has only a very small penetration with around 200 millions of active users.

And there are still myriads of tiny web forums with very active communities. I don't think every social network needs to have a global penetration.

Let’s add that twitter has/had peaks up to the billion concurrent users scale during important global events.

registered users or hits? I guess the later only.

That’s not a social network, that’s a celebrity gossip site. The appeal of a social network is that all my friends are there.

I've never used any of the big social networks to talk with my friends. I have no idea if they even are on Facebook or Twitter. But they have email and we have our own Discord place.

Everyone has email, but not everyone is on gmail, for instance.

> No one likes to check 20 different apps to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people

Then why do we have Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Orkut, Whatsapp, Instagram, SnapChat, QQ, Facebook, Hackernews, Discord, and Stackoverflow?

What you say people don't want, is exactly what people already do.

Because the medium is different. Instagram is different images, twitter is text, Fb is more local social circle. But if you have 5 twitter clones, no one wants to use 5

The thing is, Fediverse could be all of those things. There's an Instagram clone, there's a YouTube clone, there's Mastodon that's similar to Twitter, and Friendica that's more like Facebook. And you can follow them all from a single account if you want.

They could but hard to compete on content

YouTube is the big one there. But you can still share YouTube content on the Fediverse.

Even if the medium is different, the original statement was "no one wants to check 20 apps for 20 social media...". Which, as I've shown, is wrong, because already people do check 20 different apps for 20 social media accounts.

If anything, activitypub fixes this. The whole idea of the protocol is interoperability: that you need only one app to check all of them. Whether they are 5 twitter clones talking AP, or a Linkedin, youtube, meetup, and twitter-alike talking AP: all are interoperable, and you can interact with all of them from just one account and app.

I would note that you are writing this on a thriving small social network.

That is then opposite of what I find appealing. Every community I have ever been a part of on the internet has only gotten worse and eventually unacceptably bad by growing too large.

I also don't like the convergence of online identifies with real identifies in communities which also tends to ruin the point of an online community for me.

So having different groups for different purposes is precisely what I do want and having every human on Earth on one platform is the exact opposite of what I would want.

By growing large you attract predators and parasites, you must pay a very high price in moderation to removing this spam and trolling. An individual/small group of individuals fighting against every bad actor on the planet. By staying smaller you are more likely to fall under a 'dark forest'. You'll still be attacked by your local level trolls, but the likelihood you'll be attacked worldwide is lessened.

> But the whole appeal of social networks is that everyone is there.

literally posting this to the HN audience...

> There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.

Says the post on a thriving discussion forum that isn't even a social network. Quality has a quality all of its own.

The existance of Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Hacker News, Mastodon is proof this is not true.

In the real world, I have a network of colleagues at work. a network of friends at home. two separate networks that revolve around specific hobbies and rarely collide with the others. And when I go home, I have a latent network of friends & family.

And there's absolutely no reason for any of these networks to cross paths. The idea that everyone needs to be in one network, is just as logical as my mother reading my HN comments.

The appeal of reddit and tik tok is the content, not the fact that everyone is here.

I don't like checking different apps per se, but I absolutely want to have distinct social networking profiles and communities for my different interests. I'm happy to share my unremarkable opinions about technology with a wide audience, but I'd prefer not to talk about politics with everybody with a smartphone. I don't want to inflict my video game shitposting on my mom who wants to share her Wordle scores with me. For those who are inclined to such a thing, I don't think anyone would prefer to see their boss see them tweet peach emojis at influencers doing squats. And so on. None of the existing social networks perfectly serves all use cases, and I don't think they can.

>There's never really going to be such a thing as a thriving small social network.

You are saying this on Hackernews, out of all places... which is an example of one.

Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance. That doesn't really have much to do with whether it rivals other social networks or not.

But I agree, a better headline would be "Mastodon is Doomed as a Twitter replacement". It's fine for Mastodon to not want to be that. But at the same time a lot of recent arrivals were perfectly happy on Twitter and have only moved because of Musk's shenanigans. So long term they'll probably jump ship if a viable alternative comes along.

> Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running an instance.

Correction: Most of the author's complaints are about the cost and complexity of running a large instance. I know people running their own instances, with less than 10 users, yet they are happily tooting with people in other instances. They aren't missing out on something that I, on one of the largest instances, have.

This.

I have two separate identities on 2 instances. One has only 40 members, on which I am a moderator, which is a subset of a forum's community and both being funded with donation and a yearly fee to be allowed to post ads in the local marketplace. The other one is much larger but runs on a single Hetzner VPS and is also funded with donation. Admin recently switched registration to manual approval, probably to control and limit the amount of accounts.

If I ever have to run my own fediverse/activity pub server/community, I would definitely put a limit on the active accounts I would serve and have an housekeeping rule to clean up inactive profiles.

Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier?

> Performance is still dependent on user behaviour, no? If you have a user that follows 10k people then your server is going to start getting a lot busier?

If you have a user that starts following 10k user in a short time, you have a spam bot and not a user.

The fediverse is not made in such a way that your social circle grows quickly. You usually starts by following people on your own instance, then people whose content is boosted by them and it only happens slowly and gradually.

No, this isn't really true, once you interact with another homeserver Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content.

The users it finds aren't necessarily ones you've interacted with -- I know from running single server instances

I stopped running an instance because of this functionality. I was running Mastodon on my home Internet and quickly became concerned about the image content it was downloading from users I hadn't interacted with, while I wasn't monitoring the server

There is a LOT of lolicon content on the Fediverse and NOTHING is worth the risk of running a server that might download material that's considered to be CSAM to my local computer while it is unsupervised

So you have to worry about both the quantity of content it downloads and what that content is

As an admin: no thanks.

> Mastodon starts slurping up content from it to fill the third tab on the home screen with content.

Your statement is a hint to the problem.

From what I find on the Internet, you can still communicate/follow people on other servers without getting their timelines. It's just that the default setting is to pull everything from those relays and you need to disable it.

With that setting, you'll get everything people you follow on other instances, but not more. The "Federated timeline" tab will remain empty.

Moreover, I am on a large instance (social.coop) and living happily -- I pay a monthly fee and I'm confident it'll last pretty much forever (they also have a governance plan, which I find important!). I also support mastodon itself. Given the number of large servers that are financially healthy, [1] I don't expect this trend to break so soon. Given this voluntary nature however, I think the devs might be underestimating the importance of low running costs... but at scale I'm sure efficiency will improve (in the last case through alternative servers!).

I'm more genuinely worried about Mastodon and other parts of Fediverse forgetting why they were made in the first place. They are made as a network for the users, not for selling ads. They can make every decision with the users wellbeing in mind and this is incredibly powerful in today's world. (if they stick to that, I'm sure they'll find a lot of success)

Selling out as the author seems to suggest would make them into a boring Twitter clone as far as I can tell.

[1] not only mastodon.social, also others like mstdn.social, fosstodon.org, and more -- if not, check with your instance maintainer :)

> The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc.

I don’t think people want that. I mean some people, sure. But the network effect is real and I think the market will always demand one audience.

Keep in mind this doesn’t mean it has to be centralized. It could be decentralized but connected. Isn’t that kinda what Bluesky or Mastadon are shooting for? Decentralized but interoperable?

That's a common misconception. The network effect works even if the network is relatively small. And the market clearly does not demand one audience, since we currently have Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, WeChat, YouTube, TikTok, Douyin, Weibo, QQ, and so on.

Almost all of them are very different audiences, even mediums. Network effect is obviously an important part of a social media site, even if it’s not completely all-or-nothing.

It is an important part, that’s true. But not every scene/forum/product needs to reach the kind of scale where you would start thinking about running Superbowl ads.

Yes, but I think the OP was suggesting that the network effect to support a platform is much smaller than most people would think. Consider all the topical sites running PHPBB forums, for example. There are many thousands of vibrant communities around the internet, and they can all coexist peacefully. Many of them feature adds & commercial partnerships, too, and guess what? The click-through and performance of those things is relatively off-the-charts because they directly relevant to the captive audience's interests... especially if representatives from the advertisers directly participate in the community, which many do, and even moreso if the community + advertisers offer IRL community events (which many do).

Besides the depth and stickiness of topical communities, these sites also tend to be almost universally friendly and helpful, even to n00bs and outsiders. It would be a tragedy if they were to be replaced by a one-size-fits-none platform.

small specialized forum sites (like they were the norm in the days before big centralized social media) - much as I too prefer them to big centralized social networks - do have some big pain points though that are why they lost web share to big social media: isolation from other communities and user account/authentication.

In absence of an easy distributed authentication standard that just works everywhere without relying on centralized big social media accounts, what it really boils down to for the user is: the ugly need to register separately for each of these small specialized forum sites… and they all want to collect data e.g. email address. I've often found myself in the situation of thinking "nah, not worth it."

The fact that many such forums try to force casual passers-by to join with restrictions like "access to documents/images/files/whatever is restricted to registered users" only makes it worse. Makes me hate the site right away and even less likely to want to join.

In comparison, a centralized solution like reddit has the advantage that it lowers the barrier to joining and participating. Of course, that can in theory also be done in a non-centralized way, e.g. federated. But that comes with quite a set of other problems, some of which the article already mentioned for the mastodon case, both for the instance operators and for the users. And federation is much less common among small forum sites for auth than among mastodon/fediverse instances.

Indeed. The different networks are used by different people in different ways to do different things in different communities. With some overlap and cross-posting, despite some networks making that very difficult.

The strength and weakness of Twitter was dumping "everyone" into a very flat network. Increasingly that just sets people at war with each other.

A perhaps even larger problem is that Twitter dumps all tweets on all topics from everyone into that network. You can't follow someone to learn from them in their area of expertise without also hearing their political opinions, religious biases, and such. That injects conflict even though none exists naturally.

I don't know if Mastodon is the answer, but the ability to separate your posts by type would be a massive improvement. The ability to post on different servers makes it possible.

> The network effect works even if the network is relatively small.

Let's do some wild guesstimation here.

Sturgeon's Law says that 90% of everything is crap. Let's apply that to social connections and assume that any given person only cares about interacting with 10% of any given crowd. Let's actually be even more generous and assume people are an order of magnitude pickier than that: for most people, 99% of other people are crap.

Meanwhile, Dunbar's number says that a human only cares about socializing with up to 150 people. Dunbar's number itself is kind of weird pseudoscience, but it seems reasonable to assume that there is an upper bound (or at least diminishing returns), so let's be generous and go an order of magnitude higher and say that a given person won't care about interacting with more than 1,500 specific people.

Putting these together, it suggests that being a member of a network of 1.5 million individuals ought to suffice to give anyone all the social connections they could ever want.

Of course, it took silly reasoning to arrive at this precise number, but I think there's an element of truth to it. The limits of the human ability to socialize mean that, beyond a certain point, the size of the network itself is no longer the limiting factor on the ability to find people to socialize with.

Disagree. They all have different mediums.

- Social network (context network)

- Social media (content network)

Every successful network will become media. Media is winner takes all. One app defines the medium and assembles the critical mass network.

Facebook is now a media app, though it started as a “network.” Networks are static. They don’t bring value as they age, so the networks always turn into media apps.

Every social media starts with a vertical, but there are no vertical social medias. Every social media started with the cohort most in need of their particular medium. Musically(Tiktok) was teens, lip-syncing and dancing. Clubhouse was tech vcs, talking shop. Instagram was artists and designers, sharing lifestyle photos.

If the medium has reached scaled (as TikTok has), there’s no way to slice it with a vertical because TikTok already has all that content, and other content you’ll like.

>the market will always demand one audience.

People who have an interest in large audiences (media folks and celebrities) will demand one audience, but they aren't necessarily the whole market. Many will be fine to be elsewhere. Even twitter didn't provide 'one audience' at its peak.

If the market demanded one audience...

1. Why was HN founded, and;

2. Why did Reddit create the subreddit?

Unnecessary hint: Both questions have the same answer.

> I think the market will always demand one audience.

What? Ever heard anybody say "follow me on Twitter, Instagram and Youtube"? There are plenty more, all have a niche. Snapchat, Twitch, Tiktok, you name it. It's already a pluralistic world, and one more participant in the "open and free" niche is likely to have its place and fans.

Indeed.

I have around 80 followers in the Fediverse. (I have a “locked” profile which means I manually approve follow requests, mostly to keep trolls and bots away.) That’s not a very impressive number. It still is quite enough though‚ I don’t complain about the current level of interaction. Quality beats quantity.

Unlike Facebook, none of my relatives or middle school buddies are there – and to me that’s a good thing. To me, Facebook is way too large-scale for posting casual status updates.

one network can be amplified by other networks.

for example, i'm not on tiktok but i still see tiktok content everyday on twitter, instagram, and reddit. and sometimes the news.

> the market will always demand one audience

Is this the demand of the market, or the demand of the marketer? And in either case, why should the rest of us care? After seeing their work, I have a rather negative view of their decisions.

Who's "people"? Who is "the market"?

I use mastodon at the moment and I get value from it. It was network effects that brought me there - at the same time I wanted to join it, a bunch of people I was following elsewhere also moved there.

A "market" seems to be happy with Mastodon, as evidenced by a non-trivial amount of people using it.

I think the parent is referring to content creators and people who want to reach a large audience. These people will naturally gravitate to the largest hubs to minimize the amount of work required for maximum reach.

Personally I think that whole aspect of social media is toxic so I don't care, but others are not going to agree. I'm happy with an enclave where I hear the people I want to hear and am not hit with a bunch of spam and propaganda.

Mastodon is a failed product because Mr Beast doesn't use it? I don't think that makes sense.

∗ cries in timeline free from Mr Beast ∗

The siloes may actually (re)boot a working 'society'. Word of mouth, social introduction, [restricted/specialized] meeting and discussion spaces, created the original (RL) societies. Societies originally emerged from a disconnected human background. The same can and likely* will happen again.

* Generative AI's gift to human intellectual and cultural rebirth will actually be due to its motivating the birth of numerous curated spaces of discourse and interaction, with strict AI content policies. I predict there will be a cambrian explosion of these boutique spaces. And society 2.0 will emerge from this.

Mastodon is likely better off if "content creators" avoid it.

Hear, hear. I was there in the time of webrings and it was glorious! All sorts of quirky little works of art waiting to be discovered.

Then came the monolithic social networks, and we collectively changed from the weird and wondrous adventure mode into the TV-dinner that is the web nowadays. Neither is perfect, and I'm not sure at all how to have both. But I'm glad the pendulum is swinging a tiny bit back.

what if they made fedeverse protocols a standard, i.e. via NIST, ethernet, TCP/IP? or even like TSMC chip design tools/protocols?

ActivityPub is the core protocol and is a W3C standard

Mastodon is the most popular implementation currently, but there are many other implementations in the fediverse

> We're all so steeped in the recent past of monolithic centralized social media platforms, but if we peek over our recency bias, we can see that it wasn't always that way.

It wasn't always that way, but it nearly always ends up that way. Reason being the Internet makes it extremely easy to discover new services, and switching costs are relatively low. So this leads to the "winner take all (or nearly all)" dynamics that are so prevalent on the web - a service only needs to be slightly better than it's competitors to win.

People talk about the concentration of big Internet projects and companies as if it were imposed from on high. The exact opposite happened: people flocked to the services they found to be the best, and told their friends about them.

Hmm, switching costs are high when monoliths reign, and competitors need to be much, much better in order to attract people from other offerings.

I think what you are pointing to is how network effects suck up customers the first time when there's basically no competition doing the same thing. E.g. Facebook was doing something much, much better than myspace, and people flocked. But after that, switching costs became very high because of how entrenched people were on FB. It took an entire generation for that effect to atrophy, and this is unlikely because there were better alternatives, and more likely because of sociodynamics.

Now it's TikTok and Twitter and people are having a very tough time figuring out how to get out of those platforms even when they sorta hate them. High switching costs because of network effects.

Doesn't matter if there's a slightly better product. There needs to be either a massively better product or the existing products need to be seen as culturally undesirable (e.g. Facebook is cringe).

The appeal of a federated platform is that it's decentralized without being siloed. If Bluesky decides it's in their interest, they could probably figure out some way to federate with Mastodon.

The one key advantage centralized social/messaging has is spam control. Of course that's because spam is unrealized and unregulated advertising revenue that the platform doesn't control.

How does Mastodon prevent itself from becoming email? I'm unfamiliar with the design. Do you simply turtle your trust with other servers?

One of the interesting things I haven't seen with advanced AI is the antispam AI. I would love to have a semi-trustable service that reviewed incoming numbers/messages and evaluated them against expert level manipulation, propaganda, advertising, and con techniques. Of course that then provides access to the agent ...

You'd THINK facebook and google have advanced AI language models for these given ChatGPT's abilities, but I've never seen or heard anything like that. Then again, that would be customer focused, and google and facebook are now more spam/con than pro-consumer utility.

Ha, if ChatGPT is REALLY converging to the point of coding actual systems (1-2 years maybe???), then I would like to weaponize it to counter the api drift defense used by the social media walled gardens.

No one has been able to truly integrate your social media content across the walls. Because no integration stands the constant drift of api interface. BUT, if chatgpt can constantly adapt to the changes, you might be able to do it.

Consider that while the walled gardens can shift their APIs to some degree, they can't shift them REALLY fast, because their "actual" partners need some stability. So I might be able to AI adapt-scrape from my sources and centralize better.

I don't think that is within ChatGPT's current abilities, but I don't think it is that far.

"Turtling" : a defensive, cautious approach to expansion in RTS and 4X games, rather than reckless expansion and "mixing it up". In this context, you carefully whitelist nodes conservatively, but you'll miss a lot of content and people.

I might be wrong, but I think you can't see anything from anybody you're not following (e.g. if anybody spams your timeline, just unfollow).

They can spam your posts with replies. Haven't seen that yet though. Then it's up to the instance admins.

> Do you simply turtle your trust with other servers?

Not sure what turtle means in this case, but spam is currently less of a problem on mastodon (mastodon.world is the instance I'm using) than on twitter. When the admins actually care, they can solve it.

My Mastodon instance is small enough that every request I made to the mantainer was solved within a couple hours, usually by blacklisting accounts or entire servers. The “human” size of the instance (~500 users), in my opinion, can’t be ignored in this case

That was my kneejerk reaction too. It's like saying, "PHPBB is doomed!".

And as someone that's recently left Twitter behind where that would've been unthinkable a year ago -- it's clearer than ever to me now that none of it matters. If I were to lose everything on Mastodon tomorrow, oh well.

It wasn't always this way because it was never technologically possible.

> We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc.

Which I think is a good thing, and it's also how it was before, on the BBS/Forums days.

I don't understand the "doomed" concept here. How can a non-profit be doomed? Even if it shuts down, it's still not doomed since someone else will fork the project over or take ownership.

Yes, it is always good to remember that the BitTorrent protocol is successful though.

>The author doesn't seem to realize that it's not necessary for Mastodon to reach the same scale as Twitter or Facebook. We might be headed for a more pluralistic future, with a large chunk of people on Mastodon, another big community on Bluesky, etc.

Did you read the article? It's right there in the end:

>Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have lots of happy users. I’m greatful for the admins that have dedicated so much of their time running instances, and thank you to the admins who shared their instance financial information.

>If you love Mastodon I’m happy for you. The internet needs bold bets and people to invest in them.

i liked forums alot better for specialized content, i have no interest in the cesspools of unoriginal content that is social media.

I really wish Mastodon wasn’t absorbing 95% of the ActivityPub hype because everything in this article is correct. The good news is that there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn’t use Ruby and Postgres. Every story I hear about backlogs of Sidekiq jobs in Mastodon instances makes it feel like a nightmare.

More broadly though I think Mastodon is going to fail as a mass thing because it isn’t actually what people want. A lot of recent arrivals want Twitter without the corporate ownership but Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with inefficient links between them rather than one whole. You can’t even see all the replies to a message by default, it only shows you on-instance replies! And how any brand new user is supposed to knowledgeably choose an instance is a mystery to me.

Even as a veteran user I find the instance system awkward. I have many interests, how do I pick an instance to be my home? Should it be a web dev instance? A music instance? In some ways I prefer the idea of signing up on both and having people be able to follow me based on topic interest but Mastodon doesn't really have a good concept of unifying profiles in that way. Not to mention I'd then be paying to support two instances instead of one.

> there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn’t use Ruby and Postgres

There's Akkoma (Elixir, Postgres) or GotoSocial (Go, SQLite) or Takahe (Python, Postgres) and probably some I've not even encountered as yet.

'KomoD and 'RobotToaster remind me of Pleroma (Elixir, Postgres) which Akkoma was forked from.

There's also Pleroma

Some Mastodon instances block all Pleroma instances because they don't like the developer's politics though so you have to keep that in mind

Just my experience, but I think it might also be the type of users/instances.

Haven't had much trouble now (perhaps my current instance blocks pleroma), but a few years ago I dropped Mastodon because I was getting the same amount of attrition than on Twitter. And every time, is was a Pleroma user. I even voted on a ticket to create 'local-only' posts, because I didn't wanna handle Pleroma users...

A lot of Pleroma users have different politics than Mastodon users because of the history of infighting between the developers, but this doesn't change the fact that people making stereotypes about the views of users based on the software their instance uses 1) hurts single user instances of Pleroma which are much easier to run than Mastodon and 2) makes the whole ActivityPub network more toxic and cliquish

If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique

That said I don't know why anyone would assume that the Fediverse would be better moderated than Twitter when the architecture of the protocol makes regulating "attrition" harder, not easier.

> If one software type is giving you more "attrition" than the others you might be part of a clique

At that time, it was just the fact that I was a windows user.

And once because I posted a pic of me watching anime on my TV, and someone asked how I got screenshots for posting them on mastodon/blog later. User was definitely not pleased that I mentioned I got from /r/anime discussion thread for each episode

But yeah, I'm definitely part of a clique of normies that just wanna use a social network to chat with people

If anything is going to strangle the usability of federated social networking, it's petty or indiscriminate server blocking. I just saw a popular tips account suggesting that everyone running a smaller server should block mastodon.social if it grew over 50% of the active userbase.

Pleroma was the first ActivityPub server I tried running for myself. I picked it for technical reasons. I switched from it to Mastodon for UX reasons. I don't know anything about the politics of either lead developer, but I think both have crappy design decisions around how they display images by default.

Of course, block anything you want on your single-user server, and any persistent sources of abusive behavior if you're running servers for other people.

I was just adding some extra information/personal experience to the message I was replying to - and mentioning that yeah, 6 years ago, that was my experience - that some folks block based on disagreements with developers, but others, based on their experiences with users. Same that happens in a different degree and reasons, with misskey

But you seem to want to just confirm stereotypes and proclaim you used Pleroma and then be rude and put words in my mouth, so just go ahead.

I probably should have written a separate reply to the other comment that talked more about the politics of the developers.

The fact that it was 6 years ago is relevant. It may well have been the case that Pleroma was an extremely strong indicator of toxicity then, but it's probably not fair to assume that today.

From

https://docs.gotosocial.org/en/latest/

> Federation Issues > > Since every ActivityPub server implementation has a slightly different interpretation of the protocol, some servers don't quite federate properly with GoToSocial yet ...

How's the specification/validation effort for ActivityPub progressing?

https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/

The only servers I currently have an issue with federating from my GtS instance are Honk instances and that's because (I'm reasonably sure) of a Honk weirdness.

YMMV, obvs.

Anyone have any insight into the state of Takahe? Progress has slowed down a lot in the last two months.

I can't speak for Andrew, but my contributions to Takahe tapered off due to work killing my motivation to code after hours. It's also been feature complete enough for how I use it for many months.

The biggest missing feature that others want is identity migration. I hacked in support to get my identity migrated to Takahe, but it's not something releasable to the general public.

Answering my own question: https://aeracode.org/2023/04/29/refactor-treat/

“I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US; both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to build, exactly.”

>The good news is that there are folks (and I forget the name, doh) working on a Mastodon compatible alternative that doesn’t use Ruby and Postgres.

pleroma?

> Mastodon doesn't really have a good concept of unifying profiles in that way.

I think you're looking at the problem from the wrong angle. There's no need for multiple profiles if you can easily participate and be a part of both communities but at the same time not be a user of any of them.

That's the benefit that Mastodon doesn't have, because their model of how federated communities should work predates ActivityPub's spec finalization.

I think your use case would be satisfied if as a user you could "subscribe" to all activities generated on a server (or multiple), while your account would be on another one.

ActivityPub makes this flow relatively simple, and one of the projects I'm working in the space has it as a design goal: small instances addressing themselves to communities with relatively low numbers (500-1k people), but at the same time the participation and receiving of updates from any other community in the network would be a click away.

Wondering same thing here. Isn’t there a possibility of a solution emerging in the coming years? If so why/why not?

Pleroma is lightweight and fast.

> I really wish Mastodon wasn’t absorbing 95% of the ActivityPub hype

Would be good to revisit this in 12 months. Medium and Tumblr seem to be keen to start to interop with ActivityPub. Supposedly even Meta is building on top of ActivityPub for a new service (which I can't seem to find a good source to link to, so who knows).

I think ActivityPub is the new thing, so Mastodon has a bit of a first-ish mover advantage on it. Once all the big platforms get their proecjts out I think it'll get real interesting.

> A lot of recent arrivals want Twitter without the corporate ownership

Which you can have on mastodon.social. Go sign up there if you want a non-corporate Twitter. Signups should be open now.

Even if 90% of users are on a single instance, having a federated protocol matters as an insurance policy. If Oracle somehow assumes control of mastodon.social next year, everyone can move to some other instance and retain their connections.

Furthermore, if someone else creates a better vision of social networking in the future, users will be able to switch one-by-one and continue communicating across platforms. There won't be a built-in imbalance due to the incumbent's network effect.

> Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with inefficient links between them rather than one whole. You can’t even see all the replies to a message by default, it only shows you on-instance replies!

I fail to see the issue here. I'm not sure I care about seeing the most recent replies to something, from anyone, anywhere, vs the comments from the server I'm on, from the community I'm actively involved with.

I like that my server doesn't bring in garbage from around the whole of the internet with perfect efficiency.

While I agree, I believe we are in the minority.

Do those folks address the issue of ActivityPub transmitting massive amounts of data with 10000+ users? That's one of the main issues the big Mastodon communities have.

I would love to see some data about what you speak of, but a raw ActivityPub activity is maybe 1K in size. Propagating 1K sized payloads from 10K people (let's say that gives us about 10 per second) should not be that big of a deal in the age of streaming. I think unofficial censuses would put the total instance number at around 25000, so that's about the maximum number of outgoing messages a server would send.

25000(instances) * 10(messages/second) * 1000(bytes) = 256000000 bytes/s = 256MB/s of outgoing traffic

Where Mastodon really gets it wrong is with the incessant caching of media that every instance does, and which is what maybe you are inadvertently thinking of.

It may just be Mastodon which has the problem. Still, competitors should make sure to not re-create the problem.

I don't remember the specific comment but something about how one of the top Mastodon servers was transmitting 100TB of data a month, or some other else unreasonably high number. This server only had ~10,000 users.

If my math doesn't fail me that's almost an order of magnitude lower than 256MB/s. :D

I'm suprised I got so close with my back of the napkin calculation.

But what would you consider reasonable data usage for 10K users? Is it maybe possible that a technology that's trying to demonopolyse social networks is probably not optimised for high user counts on individual servers?

I don't know how much data Hacker News transmits but I'm certain it's under 100TB/month. I do know HN has >6 million requests per day and only runs on 1 server (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28478379).

I'm sure Mastodon requires more data-per-user than HN, and a server with 1M+ users will be expensive. But I don't think 10,000 users is that much, and a server with that many shouldn't cost $1000+/mo to operate.

A couple things that I would imagine add to the cost with federation:

Bandwidth costs for user content. You aren’t just hosting the content of 10k users but caching and serving the content of everyone you federate with.

Either that or the software would have to be very inefficient.

> caching and serving the content of everyone you federate with

This is a Mastodon quirk. Eugen made the decision that everything must be locally cached for the reason that big instances should not have a "slashdot effect" on remote, smaller instances. In my opinion that's wrong and his solution is actively working against the idea of "federated network", as the fediverse wants to be, and as the internet already is.

The user facing problems stemming from this decision is (from the top of my head) the fact that you can't view another user's past posts if his server didn't federate with yours. That's such a low bar of improvement that it baffles me that nobody bothered to fix it so far.

I don't know of a serious hosting provider that would have an issue with one of their customers serving 100TB volume. The problem with the monthly costs is probably due to requiring quite beefy hardware to run Mastodon's inefficient rails/sidekiq application.

> Mastodon is actually lots and lots of little communities with inefficient links between them rather than one whole

I think this is the key element that Mastodon needs to focus on to make the overall experience smoother. I've been using Mastodon for a while now, and the experience actually gets smoother the more you use it. Eventually you find enough people to follow that you forget many of them might be on instances other than your own, but when you're new, you mainly just have the local feed to go on. My account is honestly on a server with a community that doesn't quite fit my personal niche, and if it was smoother to switch servers I probably would, but I also don't feel limited by that choice as much as I initially did.

I run a misskey server on a VM on hardware dedicated to our stuff - we control the hypervisor on the boxes, we "own the IP space", manage backups, etc. Misskey is a federated activitypub instance; and in my opinion it is better than mastodon at being a "twitter replacement."

I checked the dashboard for my four user instance (myself and 3 others, total) and we're currently pub/sub to ~~5200~~ 5219 instances. I added a curated list of "journalists" across the federated activitypub realm, around 1300. So now i have basically the "news" part of twitter, 24/7, without all of the jokes, memes, and trash found on twitter. I also am on fosstodon, but I maintain that as a backup for another mastodon instance i have an account on, where both the maintainer and the public face of the instance have a "you get what you pay for" / "that's tough, suck it up" mentality toward maintenance and downtime (they're approaching less than 1 nine for the month of april). I am unsure of how many accounts fosstodon has, the local feed is pretty slow, so i'd guess between 1000-5000 users, the other mastodon instance is capped at 10,000 users, and a job removes everyone who has not logged in for a year, and signups are once a year (and maybe a thing of the past, to hear the "leader" talk).

I really like misskey. I'd probably like something else more, as i can't admin misskey competently - most of the online help, advanced documentation, etc is in Japanese.

For the record: currently 600GB attached; 130GB used, 24GB for / and 105GB for the misskey/files folder. It has 8GB of ram and 4 threads; it uses all 8 without OOM, and ~5% of the CPU. I don't really know the network throughput, but it's on par with a webforum with 3600 uniques per day. activitypub and the fediverse allows for more multimedia to be shared, faster and with less friction, so that explains some similarities and differences i see between these two decentralized services.

> All of those “features” come with with a heavy price—responsibility.

This is the issue with many of these types of services. Geeks love them; but no one else does. I don't like running a VPS or an AWS instance, because of all the overhead, so I tend to use shared hosting. I'm quite capable of running a VPS, but I can't be arsed.

I suspect that we'll be seeing some fairly large corporate Mastodon servers (like...say...Twitter). These are likely to be popular.

I've said this before on my throwaways - this is the same logic as Bitcoin. I don't want more responsibility, I want to use a service that works.

Also, like BTC, the whole thing is network effects, and barriers to entry dramatically curtail networks. People like Twitter because celebrities and journalists use it, not because of the data model.

HN has an API and a search database connected to it, but it's also "a service that works". It's not as complicated as Bitcoin, everything is abstracted as a simple account/forum system. The non-user-facing complexity is high, but the user-facing complexity is minimum.

That's what ActivityPub integration is going to look like, IMO. With companies like Flipboard and Tumblr adding integration, it's undeniable that the network is growing (even if it's not it's strong suit). For people who want an RSS-style feed with light interactive elements, it's a dream come true. Maybe that encompasses Twitter users, maybe it doesn't.

We need some turnkey VPS hardware, and a lot of these problems would be greatly reduced.

None of that was enough to stop email. Free is a very good price.

Once it was obvious that emailing was a thing many people wanted to do, and a free server became available, servers started springing up all over the place, many more implementations of the underlying protocols were developed, businesses figured out various ways to monetize, the standards evolved (somewhat).

Now let's do an inventory on ActivityPub...

1) It became obvious that tweeting was a thing many people wanted to do? Check

2) A free server became available? Check

3) Servers started springing up all over the place? Check https://www.similarweb.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/m...

4) More implementations were developed? That's where we are now

5, 6) Stay tuned

- With email, it was very easy to join and use. Get an email account, get an email address, send the email. Done. You can email anyone who has email.

- With Mastodon, it's immediately more complicated than that.

- Free isn't a factor in Mastodon's favour because Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram are also free. And it's simple to understand and join.

- Everyone is on Twitter, so if you want to see their tweets, you have to join too.

> - With Mastodon, it's immediately more complicated than that.

Is there something inherit in Mastodon that makes it more complicated, or is this an obstacle that can be overcome (like email did)

I suspect that it's something that could be "skinned" with a simpler UX.

I'm writing a very basic social media app, myself, right now, and have developed an appreciation for the complexity behind the façade.

Yes, having to find an instance to join. That hurdle alone stops a large percent of casual users.

How did email solve this?

Centralization of the biggest email providers.

This is why we don't see normal users (non techies) themselves self-hosting their own email servers to send a email, even though the option is there.

Even if they did, the biggest email providers deal with the spam problem better than self-hosted individuals, hence why it isn't a problem for users signing up to Gmail.

Mastodon will naturally gear towards centralization once the larger instances open up their instances and add defaults, ruining the whole point of federation with the biggest instances being at risk of buyouts and takeovers offers.

>Everyone is on Twitter

Not anymore and less each day. Twitter is no longer a valid choice for a lot of people.

No no I'm not referring to free for the consumer. Actually an email address was also a pain in the butt to obtain in the beginning, a small number of organizations ran email servers and you had to be attending the correct university or know the right guy or something.

What I'm referring to is free on the supply side. There is now free and widely available server software which not only will let you host a social network, but will also connect you to an existing social graph via ActivityPub. Prior to this, how were you going to compete with Twitter? You needed to build your own client and your own social graph and that was a huge barrier to entry. The tools which exist for a new competitor today (e.g. Mastodon and still a fairly small fediverse) are far from perfect, but they are improving and you can extend them however you like. That looks a lot like an environment where someone disruptive could appear, add value is missing, figure out a way to monetize and so on.

7) Google and Microsoft become dominant in the space and make deliverability harder for everyone who doesn't want to jump hoops to make their server deliverable, and even for those who do, sometimes it is literally impossible. For those who want to play the game, they do, but most people move to Gmail and move on.

>None of that was enough to stop email. Free is a very good price.

You missed some steps in your inventory listing though:

0)Able to communicate with anyone else with an account, regardless of which server they have signed up with? [ Nope. ]

>I suspect that we'll be seeing some fairly large corporate Mastodon servers (like...say...Twitter). These are likely to be popular.

Aren't the most popular ones already ran by companies?

As far as I can see from the data, the most popular is mastodon.social (ran by Mastodon gGmbH), followed by Pawoo (Russell Co., Ltd / formerly Pixiv Co., Ltd), mstdn.jp (Sujitech, LLC), baraag.net (independent) and mastodon.cloud (Sujitech, LLC).

This is exactly the problem with Linux. For decades I've been seeing developers frothing at the mouth yelling at everyone else about how they should switch to Linux. Then they try Ubuntu and they can't even change the mouse acceleration without hunting down third party tools and they leave and never come back. Users need dead simple UX. Mastodon's signup process alone has been an absolute nightmare until mastodon.social enabled direct signup.

I recently installed Linux on one of my devices. Turns out the touchpad library libinput was built by a spiritual gnome dev who decided to not give users options because that would've meant more tests. We're talking hardcoding what different taps on the touchpad do type stuff, and them all being either on or off.

Mastodon is doing fine. It is vibrant with a ton of activity.

Mastodon could be more efficient. I think there must be problems in their implementation. I think it needs a core rewrite.

I think of the current infrastructure of Mastodon as like old Atom editor. Remember it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_(text_editor). It was super extensible and ran on Electron, but it was slow and somewhat unstable.

Then VSCode come around with much of the same benefits but it was fast and stable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_Studio_Code

Before VSCode rose to prominent, many people would claim that an Electron-based editor would never work and point to the problems Atom had. But the issue was more specific to Atom and not just inherent in the general idea.

We need the VSCode version of Mastodon so it can discard the inefficiencies that it currently has and scale to the opportunity.

If the blogpost were talking about a forest, they would be saying that the soil isn't fertile enough for proper forest growth, and you would be talking about rewriting the tree's DNA.

Maybe but the first party mastodon iOS client pails in comparison to the more professional offerings. I suspect the mastodon server would similarly pop in comparison to a more professional rewrite.

Remember they switched out the core engine of mongo as well (wild tiger) and then it became a lot less of a joke.

You're not getting it. Would rewriting MySpace or Google+ have made those things succeed? No, because speed was not the main issue.

I was mostly responding to the main topic in the original post article. It was mostly about the cost of servers for Mastodon. I believe that Mastodon can be rewrite to be much more efficient.

I am on Mastodon and get a lot of engagement these days.

> it was fast and stable

There is no huge difference between Atom and VSCode. I was using Atom. It worked. It was popular. But Microsoft could afford bigger momentum - and took it. Then I used VSCode. I have noticed difference in speed only after I switched to Sublime Text.

I think you were not around when Atom was new? Being slow and unstable was a very common complaint and at the time the main solution was to switch to VSCode once it existed. Here is some old reddit threads at the time that reflects the mood very accurately:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Atom/comments/58nkn3/any_way_to_spe...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Atom/comments/2i2xs6/atom_is_a_real...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Atom/comments/7dfozc/why_is_atom_so...

Even GitHub issues on Atom about it: https://github.com/atom/atom/issues/10188

This is the reason why VSCode beat Atom, even though Atom I think was released first.

I think.. this argument is weak.

The more comparable example is whether or not BTC could replace USD for day-to-day transactions. The answer is basically no, it cannot. It can only process 7/second, due to how it works. Thus, BTC will never become the daily transaction infrastructure

Mastodon is similar. It will have severe scaling issues, as it makes simple operations far far more complex to get federated features that are more social than things like email. Just like crypto shenanigans, basically additional infrastructure will need to be built.

It's a censorship dystopia with rampant cancel culture. Nothing is fine

Run your own server and talk about anything you want. It is up to others to want to also talk to you.

Nobody will want to take to him because they’re scared no one will talk to them.

That’s apart of how this whole infection started…

You just need to make your own servers and create your own community.

In real life, if you are a hard right guy, you won't make many friends hanging around a hard left groups while yelling hard right views in their face. This wouldn't work if the roles were reserved either. There is no right that people who disagree with you need to put up with you.

You need to create critical mass so that you have a peer group and not care what others think.

> The reality is people don’t want to pick their favorite community,

> Communities are not siloed independent bubbles. People are Venn diagrams of lots of communities and interests. Selecting a username can be difficult, deciding which community you want as part of your identity—even if you can change it—is too much. The act of choosing a server has kept more than a few people away from Mastodon.

This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit. I like football and tech and travel, but I don't see why I would want to link my identity directly to one of these interests. And yes, I understand I can still communicate with other instances or can change my instance if needed, but the fact this even needs to be qualified is friction, especially for new non-technical users.

Mastodon project seems to be very aware of it this. I believe gargron said recently in an interview they're changing the mobile app to default to mastodon.social, and putting signing up for other instances behind another "Advanced" screen or something.

https://www.theverge.com/23658648/mastodon-ceo-twitter-inter...

> mastodon.social isn’t actually the default in our app. It’s just one of the top ones that shows up. However, I think that possibly going forward, we might rework the onboarding user experience into presenting a default option as well as an advanced option, where all that stuff with choosing a server would basically be hidden away from the people who get intimidated by choice.

>This is an extremely valid point and I know many potential Mastodon users that have been turned off because of it. It would be like tying your identity to a specific subreddit.

I said this last time Mastodon was discussed here, and was downvoted to hell by fans of the platform.

The best part is a particular subreddit being able to ban you from the entire platform because they don't like what you do in another subreddit.

Thanks, but no thanks.

> It’s only a matter of time until there will be a CVE found in the official Mastodon software which will leave a vast majority of instances vulnerable

It's only a matter of, er, four years ago, in fact: https://www.cvedetails.com/product/59775/Joinmastodon-Mastod...

Also, by this reasoning, Wordpress is doomed; at peak Wordpress averaged about one CVE _per week_. And yet Wordpress remains stubbornly ubiquitous...

I don't care about the title.

The opening of this article really applies to me. I don't want to manage a social network. I don't want to have to worry about the stability, politics, drama of the network I chose and so on...

Moderation, even if imperfect, is a big selling point for me, even if I don't like to think about it being so.

just go join mastodon.social then.

Probably like a number of users here, I used mastodon "before it was cool" -- and it was never in reality an "alt twitter", it was its own microblogging service, with niche communities, and with its own set of pros and cons.

IMHO the hopes of an influx of users to make it the next Twitter doesn't change the fundament of what Mastodon represents.

The author's statement that Mastodon's CEO has "no plans for monotization [sic]" does not, in my take, reduce the benefits of open-source & federated communities one iota.

Mastodon's is decentralized, why would you monotize it?

Just like E-Mail, right?

Really: The federation model is the same. It faces the same fundamental constraints (arguably exacerbated by some technical ones).

They've been solved for E-Mail. I believe they're solvable for ActivityPub by going through similar steps.

We can argue about the centralization of E-Mail all we want: There are still multiple companies providing the service and it's possible to start your own. Yes, companies - I think that while loose and and more or less charitable communities definitely have a future, real stability and trust will come from entities large enough to be too big to easily fall over (and most naturally those are companies with paying users).

I've seen so many small instances go away, leaving their users almost completely helpless and effectively locked out of the network. Keep in mind that your instance is your identity provider (I think there have been efforts to change this, but I'm not seeing any ways to migrate from an instance that is already gone).

The analogy would be closer to Usenet than email.

Activity pub federation is much easier than email. Most of the ISP's block email ports on our home connections which requires us to setup mail relays just for the email verification of account setups. Then you have to do all kinds of work to make your email seem valid and not blocked by all the gatekeepers. Activity pub is just running over HTTPS, and we can control how we federate and block unwanted content with the great tools built into most implementations.

>Just like E-Mail, right?

Are you generally afraid of losing your email account for sending a rude message to someone?

>It faces the same fundamental constraints (arguably exacerbated by some technical ones)

No, because the technical constraints are very different.

For one, with email, by default, you can keep the entire data at all times (remember email clients?).

Your account being nuked isn't a big loss if you use the default mail app that came with your OS - your messages and contacts are still there, just email them all with a "hey, here's my new email".

>Keep in mind that your instance is your identity provider

Well that's the entire problem, right there.

I had the same issue described in the article... how do you choose a community?

It was the first question I had when looking into Mastodon, and a few minutes in I closed the tabs.

I don't want to choose a community, I want a single place/domain I rely on, I don't care if the backend is decentralised, I want the entry as a new user to be as low as possible, I need to understand the product in a few sentences.

They lost me as a potential user, I wonder how many more they lost. That entry barrier (just as with UX / registration forms) has to be as low as possible.

If you think in these terms you're better off staying on Twitter and that's completely fine.

Ordinary people will sign up for Bluesky instead of Mastodon. Removing friction is absolutely essential to growing a user base.

Not everyone finds value in signaling how technical they are by overcoming/dealing with FOSS jank

If choosing one of several instances requires too high of activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem. You've circumscribed your own abilities to such an extent that it limits you to centralized for-profit social networks.

> They lost me as a potential user

Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy. You're approaching mastodon with a customer mentality. This isn't a sale being made! Nobody is losing out on profiting off your time & attention! This is you choosing whether you want to keep feeding from the intentionally-insanity-causing trough of social networks that monetize attention.

>If choosing one of several instances requires too high of activation energy then that legitimately is a "you" problem.

No it's not.

The reasons why were outlined in the article, but I'll re-iterate them:

1. Choosing a community has long-lasting consequences for the user:

-a: Losing an account due to server being unstable or unable to keep up with growth is a risk;

-b: Choice of community determines the user's ability to communicate with other users, due to the community whitelist/blacklist nature of moderation. Join a "wrong" community, good luck being seen by anyone;

2. Choice of a server is supposed to reflect the identity of the user, and they will be treated differently on the entire network depending on which community they join

-a: The moderators of the instance you join can kick you off the entire network for violating the rules of that community, even if your activity is elsewhere;

-b: In addition to other users not being able to interact with you at all if your instance is blacklisted by the admins of another instance, you will be judged by others depending on which instance you join - so you need to know what reputation the users of a community have on the network before joining the network

-c: Instance admins have complete control over your account, including the ability to read your messages and kick you off the network because of things you say in your communications, so the user needs to know the reputation of the admins on the network before they join it

>> They lost me as a potential user

>Since mastodon instances don't profit off of users (actually they cost money), this isn't really a tragedy.

Oh right, why does a social network need users for, after all?

Are you kidding me? It is a tragedy for a social network if nobody uses it.

Social network users aren't just customers - they are also the product, part of the value proposition. Both in their identities and the content they create.

Mastodon has far less to offer by design, so it's a no-go for me.

You can say "oh what a tragedy", but I'm easily in the top 1% of users on reddit with nonzero karma by either post/comment karma/number of comments/amount of text typed; so people like me are what keeps a platform alive.

Because we give others a reason to log in.

And since choosing an instance effectively means choosing an audience - yes, it is a hurdle for content creators in particular, and your dismissive attitude is an indicator that it's not an issue that is understood well by fans of the platform.

Which is why it's doomed.

Some people are fundamentally product-brained and fail to metabolize the concept of federated social media. That's fine, it's better without them.

> You can say "oh what a tragedy", but I'm easily in the top 1% of users on reddit with nonzero karma by either post/comment karma/number of comments/amount of text typed; so people like me are what keeps a platform alive.

I'm sorry but I audibly laughed when I read this.

Mastodon is where you go to hang out with friends, colleagues, and fellow hobbyists. You go there to have a good time and learn from others. People obsessed with building their personal brand or audience or upvote score embody much of what people hate about other forms of social media. The platform is much improved without them.

>People obsessed with building their personal brand or audience or upvote score embody

Are you projecting? None of that is in what I said; I just provided an easy metric.

How about, people thank me for what I write.

And it's not "product-brained" to say that an author writes to be read, a music maker wants to be heard, and an educator wants to reach as many people as could benefit from it.

>You go there to have a good time and learn from others.

Which goes to show, you need others to be there.

And the others you learn from matter.

>Some people are fundamentally product-brained and fail to metabolize the concept of federated social media. That's fine, it's better without them.

Look, if "metabolizing concepts" of federated social is a requirement for a social network, but understanding concerns of others (evidently) is not, then everyone else is better without the social network of such people too.

You fundamentally approach social networks with a producer/consumer mindset. Which is great, for some social networks. Except consuming content isn't very social. People aren't friends with a performer on stage (I believe this relationship is derogatorily called "parasocial"). I like social networks that involve people I can viably interact with in a friendly way, not in a way that constantly requires them to perform for their audience. See popular twitter accounts complaining about reply guys or people trying to riff with them generally. There are plenty of these friendly interactions on mastodon, because you can literally have them with everybody! The platform doesn't suffer because self-styled creators don't use it!

> but understanding concerns of others (evidently) is not

Your concerns can be understood without being catered to. Not everything has to be fit for your purposes. The world keeps turning without your permission.

Look fundamentally this argument is pointless. If you like mastodon then use it; lots of people do, certainly enough to make it worthwhile, and arguing about whether it will fail is a pointless exercise in trying to predict the future. Whining about how it doesn't meet your standards doesn't matter. It isn't a product that a company loses out on profit by failing to sell to you. From our brief interaction here I can tell you the platform really isn't greatly diminished by your lack of presence.

     Arguing about whether [Mastodon] will fail is a pointless exercise in trying to predict the future.

Well, that's exactly what we're doing here. That's the point of the article, and this discussion.

On that note:

    *Some people* are fundamentally product-brained and fail to metabolize the concept of federated social media. *That's fine, it's better without them.*

    *You* fundamentally approach social networks with a producer/consumer mindset.[...] *The platform doesn't suffer because self-styled creators don't use it!*

    *People* obsessed with building their personal brand or audience or upvote score embody much of what people hate about other forms of social media. *The platform is much improved without them.*

    *Whining* about how it doesn't meet your standards *doesn't matter*. From our brief interaction here *I can tell you the platform really isn't greatly diminished by your lack of presence.*

In two comments, you managed to say 4 times that the platform would be better off without someone like me (where, each time, you are assuming something about me as if it were a fact). What gives?

    I like social networks that involve people I can viably interact with in a friendly way

Was that an example of it?

    Your concerns can be understood without being catered to. [...] *The world keeps turning without your permission.*

Pardon me, but here's how it looks on my end:

>Me: I think the platform would have been better for everyone if your identity on the platform weren't tied to the instance you sign up with by design.

>You: your whining doesn't matter, and the platform is better off without you

Is that how you think conversations should go? Genuinely curious at this point.

>Which is why it's doomed.

Welp, time to get the T-shirts made. "Mastodon : Doomed Since 2016. No seriously, it's doomed."

>Welp, time to get the T-shirts made. "Mastodon : Doomed Since 2016. No seriously, it's doomed."

It will be an absolute hit with the five people who still use it in a decade.

Seriously, this dialogue reads like this to me:

-Hey, Mastodon has a severe flaw by design where your identity is owned by the server and not you, which kind of defeats the point of federation

-Why do you hate federated networks so much?! You just don't get it. Go away, we'll be better off without you anyway.

> Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale.

I mean, sure, maybe, if you're running the huge and clunky Mastodon source. Akkoma is much easier. GotoSocial is even easier again. Honk, assuming you don't need MastoAPI support, is even easier still since it comes bundled with its own UI.

It'd be easier to take the article seriously if it wasn't blinkered from the get-go.

There are plenty of sustainable Mastodon instances that are run by a cooperative of users. Social.coop has been running for ages and is very active. Members pay a pay-what-you-can fee to join the member-run coop. It works super well, and they always have a surplus they're looking to reinvest.

I'm on a canadian coop instance that launched a few months ago (@jszym@cosocial.ca). If you're a cannuck, consider joining!

I agree with all author remarks in this post.

Turns out that we already have the federated web. If we truly wanted to federate social media, we already have federated blogs. It has been on the decline a lot, but it's a choice for those who truly want it.

I've also thought that if Twitter stopped existing, it'd leave a hole Mastodon can never fill. Maybe Bluesky can? but what I'd do instead is to invest far more in POSSE, and maybe add a micro-blogging feature on my website for these random threads I sometimes write (I'd be the only account on my website, though).

From the start, I've also thought Mastodon is doomed, it gave me a "code-smell" the double @ usage (one for the username and another one for the server itself you belong to). It just never did make any sense to me (maybe I'm just criticizing the aesthetic aspects of it).

> I've also thought that if Twitter stopped existing, it'd leave a hole Mastodon can never fill. Maybe Bluesky can?

Why do you think that Bluesky will be able to do what Mastodon can't?

> Why do you think that Bluesky will be able to do what Mastodon can't?

And, why would you think that Bluesky will be able to do what Twitter can't?

i.e. remain both viable and not enshitified (1), in the face of the need to either turn a profit or be up for sale? AFAIK, Bluesky has the same kind of business model as twitter, therefor the same failure mode. Why would I sign up for that ride again?

1) https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I mentioned Bluesky just as a competitor in terms of sharing the same market with a similarly-specified product, but other than "it's a microblogging site" I don't know what else it is. I'm not there, yet.

From second hand reports - I don't have, nor do I plan to have an account - it looks like the user experience on bs is worse than even Mastodon. Similarly limited character counts, no options for formatting text, no editing, etc.

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701341

> Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale.

Tell this to phpbb/vbulletin/whatever forum admins. A huge chunk of those forums have been up and alive for 20 years and more. Yes, they are probably not super secure, do not support horizontal autoscaling and are not replicated across multiple datacenters. But who cares if they work and give the sense of community?..

Another example would be jabber/xmpp servers. Btw, google chat and facebook messenger were xmpp-based meaning you could chat with anyone outside of then-not-so-walled gardens. But this is a completely different story.

Isn't the argument that those forums are much better designed than Mastodon. From the other recent HN article on mastodon, where the author writes their own server, the protocol seems horribly innefficient.

Bit of a weird post.

"All of the 3rd party integrations are happening with ActivityPub, not Mastodon."

That right there is the solution to most of the author's complaints!

I for one would be completely satisfied with this outcome: I don't care about Mastodon, I care about the Fediverse concept generally.

Mainly I want a way of publishing and consuming short-form content that's immune from being bought and ruined by a capricious billionaire.

I am a mod on an instance there. Liked at the beginning of the trend, but it has some real problems, so many little irks that makes the real replacement for Twitter horrible.

1. Proper search. I want to search everything that is on the fediverse. Or at least for content that is federated.... Obviously not possible, but this is a big issue already.

2. You can't see followers outside of your instance! Really, try to see who is your friend following/followed and it will show just your instance folks.

3. Do people realize each instance will show different likes/share and comments, as each one is federated with different instances? This is totally nutz in practice.

4. You open a profile and can't see the posts.... because no one from the instance followed that person before and no relay with it... Again, nutz!

And in practice... The problem lies on the lack of quotes, and lack of important companies/news sites/person. I use Twitter to follow some news, see journalists' posts, and that's just impossible with Mastodon.

Bluesky and AT protocol fix almost all of those issues.

Mastodon (both the software and the communities around it) is the first successful mammal in a world of dinosaurs.

The challenges highlighted in the post feel generally true but the conclusion of it being doomed doesnt follow.

What you have in the broader fediverse and its protocols is a alternative set of blueprints for building online interaction spaces. All transparent, open source and not predicated on obscene business models (gulping the planet's entirety of private data) in order to survive.

Dinosaurs will continue roaming the digital Pangaea for a while but it is their gene pool that is doomed. They actually face all the same issues in essence, but are considerably less nimble in coming up with viable adaptations.

Will people launching mastodon instances in vast numbers in five years? Will it be an elixir bonfire? Maybe a pythonic AI fediverse? I don't know what will evolve. But that meteor on the sky is harbinger of major changes coming up.

>Mastodon (both the software and the communities around it) is the first successful mammal in a world of dinosaurs.

They should have named it "Rodent" instead.

>Dinosaurs will continue roaming the digital Pangaea for a while but it is their gene pool that is doomed.

Is it? In the real world, the thing that doomed the dinosaurs was the Chuxhulub asteroid impact, and the resulting climate disaster. Is there going to be some kind of massive apocalypse on the internet that destroys Twitter/FB/etc. and clears the way for the new mammals?

I don't want people to be Venn diagrams. I want communities to be a Venn diagram. Like subreddits, or FB Groups, or Discord servers.

I have always been a person with many interests. And Mastodon doesn't cut it for me.

The way I find new reddit subs in comments or come to know about new FB groups from friends- is missing in Mastodon.

Why should I must choose among Open Source, Math and Machine Learning? I like all of them. I should be able to see posts from all communities on a single feed.

It is also not as Twitter or Instagram. Where everything is people centric but you get suggestions and shares from different interest groups.

The way you find stuff on the fediverse is searching for hashtags. I have wildly differing interests and it's perfectly fine for me. I have load of topics and a feed that updates at a reasonable rate. following people who share your interests exposes you to other conversations with with other people.

Interestingly today's Vergecast episode "ActivityPub is the next big thing in social" [1] touched on monetization.

What I understood from Mike Cue, the monetization implementations won't come from Mastodon, but from established companies building new things, like Flipboard or Medium.

They are also thinking what needs to be added to protocol to support monetization.

IMO it doesn't need any features for monetization. ActivityPub allows creators to create accounts and allow only paid followers, or send their toots to payed subset of followers.

Problem is what servers would the masses gather? Who ever is the biggest node will of course set the rules.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/activitypub-is-the-nex...

Tumblr is adopting ActivityPub and will become the largest node on the network when its completed.

Did anything happen in this direction since Mullenweg said they're going to add support? I am skeptical of them following through with it.

Despite all this gloom and doom talk, this essay ends with, "Mastodon will continue as a niche community and it will have lots of happy users."

What does doomed mean then, Justin?

For contrast, "No VC will dump loads of money into it" isn't exactly a gloomy forecast.

It's a gloomy forecast if you're a hype cycle grifter or some rando looking to become a platform influencer. Now you have to find some other bandwagon to climb on.

shrug

FidoNet was doomed, too, in the long run.

Newsfroups were doomed, in the long run.

AOL was doomed, too.

Friendster. Livejournal. The Blogosphere.

Flickr. Xanga. Diaryland.

Myspace. Twitter. Facebook.

Tiktok. Instagram. Youtube. Discord. IRC. Slack.

That thing you're working on that involves a blockchain. Nostr. Bluesky.

I give you this litany of doomed social networks.

Some have fallen long ago. Some are still hanging on. Some are just beginning to fall.

Mastodon, right now, is rising. In ten years will we still be using it? In ten years will we remember it fondly as a transitional stage to whatever future ActivityPub clients and hosts we use to connect with our friends, build communities, and share the work of filtering out people who want to use us purely as a source of profit, or who are actively opposed to our continuing existence? In ten years will we all once more be in one monolithic corporate-owned profit-seeking social network, remembering wistfully when it looked like we might be breaking free of those chains for a while?

Even so, whatever we are using in that future: it, too, is doomed. Newspapers were doomed. Magazines were doomed. Social media is doomed.

Mastodon is hiring right now. Do you think it needs to be lighter on resources, easier to run, easier to personalize? I run one and I certainly think so. Do you have the skills to make it those things? Send them a resume. Tell them that this is what you want to do. Do you have the money to not worry about paying the bills for a few years after, say, working at Disney's feature division, then helping them build their streaming service, then moving over to Amazon for a while? Then take a working vacation: grab the source, start making proposals, start offering major patches.

Mastodon is doomed. Will you stand by and comment on its demise? Will you do something to keep it running? Will you try to hasten that doom for the good of the Fediverse by building an alternative server with a well-tested "import everything from an existing Mastodon in one click" button?

I dunno, I'm not you.

My biggest problem with Mastodon is I'm not really getting good casual interactions. I thought it would be more "open" and free flowing conversation, but its largely been this loud echo chamber of opinions and organic discussion of different things hasn't really materialized the way I hoped (this is, in fact, something I do get out of current Twitter, believe it or not)

I have tried interacting with different instances and what not, going more niche community hasn't materialized very well, traction is really low

> All of those “features” come with with a heavy price—responsibility. Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale.

Huh. I didn't it difficult to understand how to click the "Buy Now" button on masto.host I spent about 5 minutes a month "running" it which is to say, responding to the maybe 1 request by my users to block an account / server.

I spend less by letting him do it, and i don't have to deal with securing it or scaling it.

I don't know. I'm happy paying $12/yr ($1/mo) for an account. If operation costs are half that, a few thousand users can make a nice side gig hosting this.

Why does everything need to scale exponentially or it is doomed? Federation avoids the "winner take all" trap.

I don't know if Mastodon is going to grow or if something else (Bluesky?) will replace it, or if we'll just all stay on Twitter.

But it doesn't seem to me like it's doomed.

    If you don’t know what PgBouncer or Sidkiq are in 2023
    I wouldn’t invest a ton of time in learning them now.

Yeah, who needs those proven tools? I'm sure Justin can suggest you an AWS alternative that'll 100% lock you in and then go directly from "beta" to "unsupported legacy" after you adopt it. Have fun! /s

The OP conflates the fediverse with Mastodon, and my understanding of his key point is that it is doomed because Mastodon is complicated to run. As the operator of https://press.coop, I agree. Mastodon is 10 yr old web tech (Ruby on Rails with Postgres) that does not take advantage of modern cloud architectures. (The streaming service is written in nodejs and is efficient and just works)

But software continues to evolve. There are numerous other software projects on the fediverse, Cloudflare's Wildebeest being an example of a more efficient, and easier to manage implementation. Crowdfunding has become a common means for instances to be funded. It is still early days for the fediverse, and the pace of innovation continues to accelerate. Remember that Twitter was twttr when it launched, and was an SMS based app. Flickr was a Flash app.

This post should have (2017) in the title. Not because that's when it was written, but because that's when all the articles it's a rehash of were written.

I feel the real problem with Mastodon is that there's no way to reclaim an identity if a server goes down. The idea of a fediverse is to be robust against instances collapsing, but it seems the only way to move server is to leave a pointer on the old server.

Instead, you could put a public key on your profile and keep a local backup of your data and private key. Then if your instance dies or you get booted out (there will always be tyrants and schizms) you can still set up shop somewhere else and ping your old followers with a signed message.

Right now it's like a city with a lot of bars which is great except you can't leave and go to a different one with the same face.

> I feel the real problem with Mastodon is that there's no way to reclaim an identity if a server goes down. The idea of a fediverse is to be robust against instances collapsing, but it seems the only way to move server is to leave a pointer on the old server.

Email has the same problem, but is it really a problem?

I guess with email you can at least use your own domain with a third party provider because it has a DNS record, which gives you somewhere between self-hosting and a federated community. Of course, if you lose your domain you're out of luck.

Nostr solves this problem, your identity is defined by a private+public key pair, you own your account and history instead of the node admin.

I think that you're describing Nostr.

[OP] Bluesky/AT protocol solves this by making identity a DNS domain verified with TXT record. That's also 1. unsquatable 2. universal across apps

My Bluesky name is my site justingarrison.com and it can be that on any other sites that use the AT protocol instead of ActivityPub

Running an instance isn't expensive. Running an instance with 10,000 users might be, but you don't have to have lots of users. I run an instance and I can and do easily communicate with lots of other people on other instances without much effort at all.

I'd say that I've managed to find more people, with less effort who share some of the same interests as me and honestly I don't know which instance they are on because it didn't matter. Using hashtags to find content that you like, following a handfull of people and suddenly your feed comes alive.

Perhaps we should stop teating users like morons. Sure it's different but people learn.

Hachyderm.io is operated by an Ukrainian Faschist who censors any truthful comments and bans people because of that on 1st occurrence.

I ran my own instance and deleted it after 3 months. No one wants to accept you as a relay. The only one who did accept was Beckmeyer, good guy. But it had week long outages. Searching Mastodon posts is impossible. There's a very strong cancel culture on Mastodon instances. The main players control who can and can speak freely.

It's all even more fucked up than Facebook and Twitter.

Add to that PITA upgrade procedures, and a 500 char limit per post, which includes hashtags.

Absolutely ridiculous how this pos software made it so far.

Their policies seem good. It looks like you've broken their rules, got banned, and you're continuing to be a dick about it.

https://community.hachyderm.io/docs/moderation/covenant/

Also please note that fascism is a specific ideology, not merely a description for everyone who doesn't want you in their community.

"You can, of course, run your own server. Just like you can run your own email server. And you will be blocked from the broader public discorse just the same. There will be no way for large instances to trust and allow every individual instance. The moderation work will be too much and they’ll end up trusting only large, established instances."

I don't think this is happening. Instances are only banned after they attract negative attention, not whitelisted, which would be antithetical to the idea of federation.

That's a silly take. It all comes from the perspective that Mastodon has to be the next big thing. This is BS. It can stay small and serve those who choose to use it.

It appears that the official Mastodon app has crowned 'mastodon.social' as the default on the official Mastodon app. [0] So it has been admitted that asking the user to 'choose a server' was a disastrous thing to do for adoption which confuses the user from the start.

Hence this 'default' it also means the centralization of mastodon.social will accelerate, federation never mattered in the first place and risking the same problem that happened with pawoo.net, mstdn.jp and and mastodon.cloud all acquired under one company. [0] So the bigger you get, the bigger you are as a takeover target.

If the instance is too small, will risk getting DDoSed very easily and won't be able to handle an influx of new users and would have to close signups. If it is too big, it risks not being able to scale and needs to re-centralize with Cloudflare and the instance will receive lots of take over attempts from those with deep pockets.

Eventually, the owners will cave in. Just like they did with a 'default' instance.

Do not tell me that you will reject someone willing to take over an instance with lots of users for hundreds of millions of dollars.

[0] https://mstdn.social/@feditips/110233282251253677

[1] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquir...

A solution for developers built by developers. Should have thought of the end user first.

"The reality is people don’t want to pick their favorite community, running an instance is expensive and complicated, and owning your data isn’t a product feature."

This is the problem that affects all federated/decentralized projects. Same thing with Urbit. No one wants to keep their computer running 24/7 to support a network. and no one wants to bare the financial burden of paying for a server to host a community.

For me the decision of having to choose a server always made Mastodon a non-starter for me. Just requires too much activation energy to even get started.

It is about freedom and choice. If you don't want that or are unable, there are plenty of platforms that make the choices for you.

A technologically interesting product and a relevant commercial product are two vastly different things. Problem with these projects is they are driven by technical curiosity instead of being run like businesses.

The sweet spot is finding ways in which decentralization fits use cases that centralization cannot provide, all while being vastly superior to everything else. That hasn’t been the case so far for social media.

I think there's a point in particular that's not true:

> If the instance you’re on is compromised you will lose your identity because private keys are stored as part of the instance. No private keys, no identity, no portability.

I don't think it's quite so bad, although of course a server vulnerability is bad: you can have an email account as a backup. That's the way many services have kept secure: you can invalidate the old password after a breach and email users a new one. In the worst case, you could try to prove to moderators you're really the account owner. However, the most important point is that it's just an account: you can just create a new one, and be mostly fine (after letting people know you've moved). In the case of the breach mentioned before, a notice could be left on inactive post-breach accounts.

There's not really too much data you'd care about that isn't public already, and you can do regular backups in case there is (private messages, I guess?). It might be nice to add some auto backup functionality to some cloud service I guess.

[OP] the reason I pointed that out is because public figures (reporters, celebs) can't risk that. If a server is hacked and their private key is stolen you could post anything you want as them. Of course twitter has had the same problems in the past but twitter was able to help them (usually) reclaim the account.

With ActivityPub if I stole your private key there's nothing you could do to stop me until the server rotates keys. AFAIK there's no way to scrub the fediverse of tweets I sent signed with your hacked private key.

I don't know enough about ActivityPub to be sure, but it seems that the "push" format is the problem?

If user U1 on server C1 subscribes to user U2 on server C2, does that mean when U2 posts, C2 sends the post to C1, independent of wether U1 is online or not?

If C1 can only request the updates while U1 is online, then the Fediverse should scale just like RSS.

I never heard anybody saying that RSS is doomed because of scaling issues.

The same net quantity of data would likely be sent so I'm not sure what the advantage would be.

There's be some savings from users just never signing in & never pulling. But also, server c2 also has hundreds or thousands of other users too. If any of those subscribe to u1, that traffic would have been sent either way.

So the hypothetical unread messages advantage of pull rapidly erodes at any kind of scale. I'm not sure what the gain might be.

One nice thing about rss is that it's relatively cacheable. CDNs are well optimized. Honestly I think it's mostly just bad implementations, that figuring out what messages to pushing data out ought be fairly optimizable & not terrible to scale out effectively. But being efficient & smart about it does take some though.

> the "push" format is the problem

I mean it only worked for email since the dawn of the internet. :P

But ActivityPub has no concept of "online" for actors, the activities that have an actor in their recipients list will end up in their inbox no matter what.

[OP] Active vs static/passive protocols is a big scaling, security, and maintenance problem. I wrote about it previously [1] and proposed adding a static option to ActivityPub and was flatly denied.

[1] https://justingarrison.com/blog/2022-12-06-mastodon-files-in...

If someone wishes for a thriving Fediverse, Mastodon HAS to die. And Misskey and Pleroma (and Akkoma, and Takahe) too. The way these apps are shaped requires a subscription model or a big thankless spender to keep them afloat, they will sooner or later be the reason for more siloing incidents and creation of new walled gardens. I already know most of the users have no alternative, but still.

Articles like this seem to fall just short of the goal line. For instance, this line:

> Like Wordpress, the best way to use Mastodon is to pay a company to run it for you.

Why didn't the author just go one more step to realize that most people don't run their own Wordpress instance, and Wordpress is thriving?

I use Wordpress daily, and my company uses it - but it's hosted, not a self-run thing.

The author is most likely right in that most people either will stop running their own instance, and out source it. But this is a time-honored pattern in IT. Many of us used to run our own email, web servers, Wordpress, etc. But for most of us, we've replaced that with services to do the same.

There is no reason that there can't be a successful mastodon ecology just like there is for Wordpress.

It makes sense that there would be many mastodon.example.com sites run by all sorts of folks, but hosted by different providers.

Why can't articles like this see that?

[OP] very good point and Wordpress has a ton of adoption. I used to run my own until it got hacked multiple times over a years and I got tired of fixing or restoring it.

Once tumblr has ActivityPub integration it'll have the largest node in the network. Is it still Mastodon? Isn't that just tumblr and the AP integration is an alternative RSS/Atom? Then Mastodon becomes Google Reader with comments and stars?

>Isn't that just tumblr...

In my eyes, if a bunch of different platforms have a reasonable degree of interoperability, and Mastodon is connected into that datastream, then Mastodon has won (and not doomed).

Because in the end, the federation allows people to take their toys and go home if they so choose, and the risk of being censured or "de-platformed" essentially goes away.

I think about email a lot in these conversations, and I remember when we used to have to set up sendmail and all sorts of other crap to have email. Now, sendmail has basically gone away, but we use email more than ever, and billions of people are still connected. Sendmail was that original structure that that broke apart the proprietary & enclosed email systems like CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, etc.

To me, there are still issues with the email ecosystem today, but I don't lament sendmail's loss of market share, and I don't think of it as "doomed" but rather a huge success that spawned a massive industry. I think of AltaVista as doomed, because Google replaced it, and there was no shared or interoperable search ecosystem.

Does that make sense? Hard for me to put into writing without rambling.

----

EDIT: meant to add that I liked your article, and I could tell you put a ton of work into it.

It's funny watching all this because we had all this in the 90's and early 2k's and went away from it for a reason. Anyone remember Hotline or Caracho? These were client/server/tracker software for federated communities. If you wanted to host a server which had chat, messaging, forum, files, etc you'd download the server software and run on your computer using something like DYNDNS to keep your host address static. You'd register with a tracker so that others could find you. Trackers could ban servers they didn't like by not listing them. People running client software would connect to a tracker to get a list of servers and connect to them if allowed. The server operator could have a free for all or create privileged accounts. It was great.

But it can't scale and it's too complex for most people. People left these types of networks for Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Going back to this, or a variation of it, is simply regressive. It's the wrong direction.

I’m checking in regularly to see if it’s Twitter yet (the only reason I’d use it) and so far it’s not. It’s slowly getting closer but still a long way off the time when you can just use it as a timeline of tweets from 100 known people like I use Twitter.

I realize becoming Twitter is a non-goal, but the actual goals are also uninteresting to most I think.

If you wont use it until it's twitter, just use twitter. The fediverse doesn't want to be twitter.

Very few care if most people don't want to use it because they've been using it quite happily for years before twitter imploded. blusky looking at payment for likes is a joke too.

> With no income potential.

Why is there no income potential? It seems to me that if Mastodon grows, there’s lots of income potential.

I guess what he means is that the software itself doesn't provide any management for payment/subscription for access or features nor any advertising management.

> It seems to me that if Mastodon grows, there’s lots of income potential.

That is 7 years of "If", and all we get is instance takeovers, [0] where companies buy and own the users on multiple instances from the admins.

If you are an admin with 1M registered users, you can sell them to the highest bidder. If you are a user, you get nothing.

So much for the nonsense of "Social networking that's not for sale" as a tag line.

[0] https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mask-network-acquir...

What is the biggest resource bottleneck in Mastodon?

Like, are the certain design decisions that could be optimised to make it more resource efficient? Is it just because it is written in Ruby? Is there something inherent to ActivityPub that means it has to use a lot of resources? Can work be done to make it cheaper to run?

ActivityPub involves a HUGE number of HTTP requests. Every time you create a post your server has to deliver that post via HTTP to every other instance that has at least one of your followers - this can quickly grow to hundreds of deliveries if you have a few thousand followers.

Mastodon uses a Sidekiq queue and Ruby threads to handle these deliveries.

I have a strong hunch that switching to delivery through a more efficient mechanism - async IO, or a lower level language - could have a big impact there.

My web browser doesn't blink at loading 100 resources to render a web page, so delivering a few hundred HTTP requests shouldn't be impossibly hard to scale, even when you take retries into account.

I see. So essentially the issue is built in to the way Activity Pub is designed.

It is a scaling issue. Your browser may not blink at loading 100 resources, but say you were constantly reloading 100s of tabs, it would start to grind down. Rewriting in a more efficient language would help, but that would just mean it would start to grind down when you have 20,000 users rather than 10,000.

I'm surprised it doesn't do some kind of batching peer to peer communication instead. Maybe that wouldn't be as real time.

Thanks for the insight.

Yeah, I'm hoping he's wrong, but this good analysis.

Count me in as among those who actively does want Mastodon to be the new Twitter.

Its becoming increasingly clear to me that a hugely scaled microblogging platform is important (if not essential) to world discourse and democracy, and that a federated platform is probably the long term best, if not easiest, way to do it.

Honestly, the bit that kind of baffles me is the extent to which big companies don't seem to realize that this solves potential "Eli Lilly" problems. This shouldn't be too hard to explain either.

"Hey, you know how you can own your email and your website? You can do that too with something like twitter if everyone starts using Mastodon. You should throw some money at a server to do that."

What we need is a common platform, an operating system for building interoperable and scalable decentralized services. This is exactly what we're building with https://docs.freenet.org/.

My n=1 experience has been far better using Mastodon than twitter.

I used to check the Twitter Explore page without logging in, just see what was going down. But now that they've 'bodged' that up too, they've released me from any reason to go back. Thank you, Elon.

It's a relief to encounter generally "real" and/or "interesting" people (who are the kind of people to persist on Mastodon) instead of political mudslingers, blue check twitter maximalists, Elon d riders, etc.

Just a better experience all around.

Mastodon feels a bit like the old bulletin boards used to feel like - "just over there dealing with its own niche in a calm and kind of fun way ... not the centre of the universe or trying to be this or that...".

And I'm thankful for it.

Vaguely reminds me of late 90's early 00's articles saying linux was doomed lol. The reasons are all similar anti-open source reasons. General disregard for personal responsibility and ownership along with preference of the masses towards ease of use.

[OP] on the flip side, did you know 2022 was the year of Linux on the desktop! https://justingarrison.com/blog/year-of-linux-desktop/

As far as hosting costs per user go, I think the Mastodon software could be implemented in a much more efficient manner. There are already alternative, working proof-of-concepts which are much leaner.

As far moderation, that's a harder thing to handle. Don't know really.

> If mastodon is to be the poster child of the fediverse it needs to drastically simplify the requirements to run and maintain an instance.

Completely agree.

I tried to self-host Cloudflare's Wildebeest as part of the "own your own identity and content" dream and it was a complete disaster. It's an incomplete amalgamation of alpha-quality and production Cloudflare services and code with no real roadmap. It doesn't install properly out of the box using their own documentation and most clients will try to use some Mastodon/ActivityPub API that isn't implemented and fail. So unless you're looking to seriously hack on its codebase, I'd recommend staying away for a few years.

Substack is the real 2008 Twitter alternative, having more people in a platform is a anti-feature

I also never really got into Mastodon. My belief is that you still need to build a 10x better product, and Mastodon hasn't achieved that.

Now, the upside for Mastodon is - they have a great platform that a number of people have flocked to bc of the Twitter backlash. Can they create sustainable value for the communities (or people within those communities)? What do people who run these communities want (beyond decentralization)?

Personally, I think the crux is reputation-building. You need to give a few Mastodon users a sense of pride in engaging everyday with their community. From the handful of servers I'm on, I don't see this clearly happening yet. But hope they can get there!

    All of those “features” come with with a heavy price—responsibility. Running your own instance is increadibly time consuming and difficult to understand how to secure and scale. It also can be quite expensive if it grows to any meaningful amount of use.

I think it's important to note, which I think the article fails to do, that this isn't a problem with other Fediverse software, but something unique to Mastodon:

1) Ruby on Rails is, well, bad. It was in the past, but I hoped things had changed. I tried running Mastodon, and in the two weeks I was playing with it late last year there were two dependency updates which broke Mastodon, until Mastodon was updated. It's untenable, and it certainly adds to the idea that running your own is "increadibly time consuming", if you have to worry about breaking things any time any dependency gets updated.

2) The failure of Ruby on Rails leads to insecurity. Most people don't update because of #1 and just let things run. This is all fine and dandy until there are real security issues, at which time people sometimes panic, update and break things, or there's a compromise.

3) Mastodon (and Ruby on Rails) isn't performant. A decent modern server, particularly one that could be bought for $5,000, should easily be able to handle 30,000 users, if one were to extrapolate from some of the articles written about Fediverse hosting... But the articles showing very good performance aren't about Mastodon. Some specifically talk about migrating to other software because of Mastodon performance.

So is it time consuming? Yes, because it's slow, breaks easily and doesn't scale well. I think it's demonstrably true that other software (Pleroma, for example, or Akkoma for those of us who aren't fans of the Pleroma admins) is faster (and therefore scales much better), isn't remotely as fragile (and therefore can be kept up to date and secured with ease), and less time consuming (most updates take literally a minute or two).

Perhaps the author should consider the idea that the failure of Mastodon is not the same thing as the failure of the Fediverse precisely because other options exist.

[OP] Did I say the fediverse would fail in the article? I tried to not imply that in any way. But Mastodon is the largest fediverse network and I don't see it scaling or accommodating the general public.

Perhaps it was a bad choice of words in this specific place where you lumped in Mastodon with the Fediverse, but this, as it reads, suggests that with the failure of Mastodon we'll also see the loss of the ideals of the Fediverse:

> It has nothing to do with data ownership, identity portability, or federated networks. The ideals of Mastodon and the fediverse will be lost once established products use it.

Also, you made some broad generalizations which I don't see evidence to support:

> And you will be blocked from the broader public discourse just the same

Why would large instances pull a Google on smaller ones? I've never seen that, nor do I see anything indicating that somehow it's inevitable. Do you have any evidence showing this will happen?

As someone who has run email servers for a quarter of a century and as someone who is more than happy running my own Akkoma instance, I haven't seen even a mention of people who are marginalized because their server is somehow not big enough. I'm curious if you have, though.

[OP] Can someone explain to me why when I submit my articles to HN [1] they are mostly ignored but when other people submit them they go to front page?

Why is there no automatic post merging? It’s really hard to keep track of replies and engage when I’m looking at the original submission

edit: I’m also not sure why this submission has a question mark. This article wasn’t intended to be a question

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35701341

One of the reasons we need faster upload speeds, so people can host from home.

This seems pretty wild to me that for say a social network I need fast upload speeds.

Once you implement a basic ActivityPub server, you realize you're basically asking for a friendly DDoS. If you toot a photo to 1000 followers, your server needs to blast it out to every unique instance in that list of 1000, then ask for whatever updates they have. It's not "efficient," but the upside is that it's conceptually very simple.

> If you toot a photo to 1000 followers, your server needs to blast it out to every unique instance in that list of 1000

I might be misunderstanding here but if you make a status with a photo, it doesn't attach the literal bytes of the photo but the URL to your local copy of the photo which may, admittedly, by fetched 1000 times by those instances if someone on each of those instances looks at it.

cf https://octodon.social/@pzmyers/110265584018863694 which has the link //assets.octodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/265/581/155/000/717/original/0b24824d56920b79.jpeg and also a preview link of https://assets.octodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/26....

Unfortunately, what happens is that (for some reason), instances cache remote media. So if I'm on rando.zyx, it will download and cache the image from octodon.social for local rando.zyx users.

It's not just images either, it's the same with link previews, so any link that gets posted will get visited by the instances your instance is federated with, it's even worse when you post a link to a video.

Small example log: https://pastebin.com/raw/jYZ1z8dG

I've seen some cases where there's been 1000+ requests to a site just because a link to it was posted.

Now that is a problem. But people have suggested workable solutions and hopefully at some point, the Mastodon authors will pull their heads out of their hole and get on with implementing something. I wouldn't hold my breath, mind.

Earlier today I posted a link to a video on my webserver, all the instances hammered me so hard it maxed out my 1gbps connection

It's been an issue since 2017[1] (since moved to [2]) but the discussion always devolves into "but what if someone LIES in the federated preview??!!?!" bikeshedding.

[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486

[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662

Which is a very different situation to "blast out the photo to 1000 instances".

But even then, not all of them fetch and cache media on receipt of a status (e.g. mine don't) and they're not fetching them at the same time according to my logs.

You may well still end up serving 1000 copies of the photo (or even more if people aren't caching) but it's 100% not "blast out the photo to 1000 instances when you post" - it's much gentler.

It is a funny that from our point of view, sending out to the internet has one flat cost. Most of my friends (people who would be interested in my photos) live in the same state as me. A bunch live in the same or adjacent towns…

Home upload speeds aren’t holding that back. Hardware is.

What is the average social media user going to host their Mastodon instance on? I wish it were possible to run mini-servers on something like an Apple TV, goodness knows there’s enough CPU going spare there most of the time. Or that ISPs shipped routers capable of it. But alas most people don’t have sufficiently open hardware just sitting around at home.

My upload speeds, that I pay 120/mo for, are under 300kb. Boradband in america is largely a joke. I have only one provider in my area under 200/mo.

> What is the average social media user going to host their Mastodon instance on?

A Raspberry Pi?

https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi

(Sadly no AkkomaPi yet, it seems.)

I love the idea of it. The average user is never going to do it.

> Unzip the image and install it to an SD card

OK, you'll lose some people here but a lot could handle that

> Configure your WiFi by editing pleromapi-wpa-supplicant.txt

Aaand they're gone

Run Yunohost on any SBC or old laptop you have laying around. That is what I do.

Many ISPs forbid web hosting from home.

CGNAT needs to die as well.

THIS!

except that nobody wants to host its own server, just a minority of minority of geeks

From what I can tell developers and the infosec community moved to mastodon, that's good enough for me. I don't have to everyone on the planet using the same social media service for me to use it.

A useless generalization like "people don't want this" is a great example of why there's room in the world for a federated network of small instances. Humanity is not the Borg. The folks who obviously do want something different than a centralized network run for profit can go on happily using federations while people who want a new Twitter with a new board of directors calling the shots can go use one of those. It's ok for both to exist and to serve different purposes. Really.

I don't know about Mastodon, but Friendica has been a smashing success from my perspective. My feed is full of interesting people, many of whom are on Mastodon. It doesn't have to be for everybody; it's pretty good the way it is.

That said, I think a Fediverse account should be standard with an ISP account just like email. Pay your ISP to maintain the server just like they maintain everything else you already you already use. And if you use your account for threats and harassment, your ISP knows who you are.

Running your own instance is not difficult. I recommend installing Yunohost.org on a $5/month VPS or some hardware you have laying around such as a single board computer. Installing apps from the Yunohost catalog is like installing from an app store. You can try different apps like Akkoma, Mastodon, Calckey, and others until you find the one you like. Then Yunohost makes maintenance and upgrade easy thank to the community of people maintaining the scripts that do everything behind the scenes.

So the approximate fair market cost is roughly 10 cents per month? 5 cents for server costs, double that for a decent profit margin?

So maybe charge $2/year for the service or something?

It seems like most Twitter power users who prioritize easy setup, UX, and audience access, and who don’t really care about federation, are migrating to Substack Notes.

this whole article is literally FUD.

"some instances shut down", "there might be a CVE and everyone will reevaluate", "moderation isn't centralized"

Beyond scaling concerns is the legal responsibility. If you host an instance for other people you should be prepared to invest time documenting and training moderators...

The idea that there are laws that surround this stuff...laws that lock out enthusiastic people from sharing their own Mastodon servers with the world, is so sad to me.

It's antithetical to the hacker spirit and it will stifle any grassroots effort.

The web has gotten way too serious.

There will and probably already are server implementations that are resource minimal and easy setup. There's nothing about ActivityPub that stops this.

There's no way to read a mastadon post without executing javascript. There's not even a proxy like "nitter" is for twitter to view posts as HTML. The "best" way is to read the entire feed of a user by requesting it as json and parsing that with your eyes. It's a terrible user experience. I mostly just ignore mastadon servers post version 3.

Why don't you host an instance of snac and read posts from there?

https://codeberg.org/grunfink/snac2

While that c code is at least unchanging on my disk and reviewable, it's still a lot to ask that I compile and run special software to read a particular type of webpage. Mastadon's design is terrible in the sense that it perfectly captures how bad twitter was/is without any of the community mitigations of the disaster in accesibility.

I don't want to run an activitypub server. I just want text and image websites to actually have text and images. This is not too much to ask for a community protocol. Before mastadon v3 it was an option (and the default option).

> hachyderm.io had trouble scaling ... with 30,000 users and over $5000 worth of equipment... They were able to migrate ... to Digital Ocean ... at a cost ... [of] more than $1000/mo.

1 TB of data fits several time in a typical consumer HDD. Is it really not enough to have $5,000 USD of hardware to run a 30K-user Mastodon instance?

Mastodon isn't the only solution to run a server. He mentions that a single binary, smaller sized server is necessary.

I would say, either that or a PHP based one. It is not difficult to run Friendica on something like dreamhost. It might not be as instant with delivery, but more than enough for an individual or a small group.

Mastodon Isn't trying to be the next Twitter, it doesn't need to scale. Some of the very best communities are just 10,000 people. We can connect with each other, and see others instances.

The author is to totally missing the point.

If the headline has anytbing to do with it

He's not wrong. I'd love to join the fediverse but I want to do so on my own terms with my own server, and I don't want to set up an entire mastodon instance just to do that. Making activitypub synonymous with mastodon is dangerous and i am sure is not what the intention is.

I’ve been around since before the Internet was available to most folks. Seen it grow, lived through Eternal September, watched all the technology revolutions come and go. It’s fun reading predictions like this some times.

In the late aughts FB was only getting started. xkcd drew a map of the Internet at the time where FB became a huge land mass and all of the other popular sites at the time were beginning to dwindle as little islands and archipelagos. Funny how from then until 2016 or so that FB continued to dominate and take over.

Google, Twitter, etc joined the fray too and the idea of centralized social networks taking over everything became the new normal. Businesses replaced their websites with Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. Developers stopped hosting their vanity sites and wrote Medium articles instead.

But before all of that got going, before VC money and HN and the current crop of IPOs took hold, there was a period in the early aughts when much of the foundations of what we know the Internet today was built… by hobbyists, hackers, and the OSS community. Some of us worked at company’s that funded our efforts, some of us built things to satisfy our own needs and communities.

But many predicted it would all go away under the pressures of capital and an influx of non-technical, casual users.

In a sense it did. But I think Mastodon and ActivityPub’s continued existence and thriving communities wouldn’t have been predicted by someone in 2016-2017.

Doomed? We’ll see.

I used to run my own server. Then I checked out #nsfw to see how much porn was getting federated into my google cloud storage bucket. I don’t want to have a Google account limiting argument with Google about this so it seemed safer to move to somebody else’s server.

News flash: tech and fads change constantly on the internet. Almost everything is “doomed”.

Yall are looking at this the wrong way.

Mastadon is a bad Twitter replacement. But with a few tweaks, it is a good Discord and Telegram replacement. The inevitable Discord/Telegram monetization squeeze is going to be a huge event for Mastadon.

How much do you pay for Mastadon? How much does it cost to host?

For a big former Discord group? Probably a lot.

But many Discord (and some Telegram) admins already self host auxiliary stuff and solicit community donations for funding. TBH they would probably like running their own instance as a hobby.

So many people are saying that picking an instance is just too difficult. Let's just create a random picker like a Roulette wheel of all open instances for those people. Moving instances later is easy.

Disingenuous to say that mastodon.lol shut down “because of Harry Potter” when in actual fact it was a disgusting and prolonged character assassination attempt against the sole admin

The biggest struggle to me for admins will be spam management.

I can't help but draw parallels to Mastodon and the Year of Linux on the desktop. There was no way Mastodon was ever going to succeed due to the network effects.

I clicked through expecting to see a blog post from six years ago, but according to the timestamp this post is only a couple of days old.

I don’t want to hijack a mastodon thread for an alternative, but because it is invite-only and still very new if people here want to try out Bluesky, send me an email at: sam at elborai me. I just got a whole bunch of invite codes and I’m happy sharing them with fellow HNers.

It’s late in my time zone, so don’t expect a response before 8-10h, but I read all my emails in the morning.

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again. Mastodon has the same problem Diaspora did. Their name/branding is terrible and doesn’t resonate with non techy people. Nerds who make cool tech shouldn’t be in charge of naming it.

I'm all for valid criticism, but this read more like a rant (a rather long one at that). I think it's interesting that they used hachyderm as an example of why things don't scale, when that organization has managed to build a robust platform and nonprofit based off of user contributions.

This article reads like the first articles about Twitter.

I'm not sure that makes sense.

I can't imagine discussing twitter in the early days and how users / communities have to manage servers / are shutting down, etc.

You obviously weren't on Twitter in the early days of the Failwhale and "Twitter will never scale." In fact, the original Ruby implementation didn't scale and was eventually discarded. The same thing will happen with Mastodon if it becomes necessary.

VCs hate Mastodon (actually the federation) because they can't control it. Hence this post. Nothing to see here.

>1 billion posts per month >Niche

tldr: All the eager people who went “hey we can do what big tech is doing too” are starting to realize it was never JUST about the tech. There’s financial resources and man power.

Whataboutism is a powerful drug.

Let Mastodon die and let Nostr take over. Nostr to me sounds superior in pretty much every way.

Too bad you don't let us know how exactly.

Please explain how it's superior? When I looked at it months ago someone was hardcore spamming porn images with fresh identities each time in the global feed, and all client implementations were terrible.

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