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Comment by Krisando | Hacker News Reader

> The fediverse stuff works pretty well as far as I can see.

Not the grand parent, my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

> The only thing the fediverse lacks that Twitter really provided was the starfucking celebrity culture.

If you pay attention to the few notable people in their fields, they describe some of the problems such as:

https://mas.to/@TechConnectify/111511735894043437

I hope my comment explains some of the whys for you.

View on HN

I read this thread and it's not really clear what it's about. It seems to be about the need to mute and block people explicitly. I haven't had to do that much with Mastodon. I had to do it a lot on Twitter, and by all accounts it has gotten much, much worse.

I called the Fediverse a "regression" for a reason. You could lose all your blog posts, too --- there were things that mitigated the risk, just like there are with the Fediverse, but there were no real promises.

My point is, it's a regression back towards a world nerds tend to aver was a kind of golden age of reading and writing online. A lot of the things people now say they appreciate about Twitter are part and parcel of the way Twitter destroyed that golden age. Now we've got it back. I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.

Personally I couldn't stand to use Mastodon without a lot of keyword blocks and blocked users.

There are a lot of people on Mastodon who use the word "fascist" the way some people use the word "fuck". I block that. I block the names of most national Republican politicians because I hear enough about how bad Trump is from the MSM.

There are people on Mastodon who have an absolute fit because somebody replied to their post and unfortunately it is being framed like the "reply guys" are the problem

https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/22/mastodon-tackles-the-probl...

and not people who take a fit on the slightest provocation. My take is that when Twitter went to hell the bottom 1% of disagreeable people left first to go to Mastodon and you find them there.

I have never had that problem, nor have I personally seen anyone have that problem.

The "you are replying to someone you have no connection to" warning is a good idea. I thought Twitter at one point did something similar. For me, it has nothing to do with any "Reply Guy" phenomenon, but rather countering the weird parasocial thing that happens to make people feel entitled to join conversations they're not a part of as equal (in the conversational sense) peers. You can talk to strangers! But in real life, there is a protocol and a set of norms for doing so. The norms Twitter replaces them with are unworkable and terrible.

I have noticed that some people still take the server affinity thing seriously, that they might work to create bonds with people that happen to be on the same server. I don't think that model is long for the world. I think we're going to end up somewhere similar to Blogger, where most people "run" their own "instances", which are really just tiny managed slices of huge multitenant servers, and the idea of talking mostly to people on "your same instance" will be as archaic as webrings.

>I'm surprised at some of the people who aren't overjoyed by this, who I expected would be.

lots of "new world" people used to the new ways, some old people changed, and other old people have simply withdrawn from the conversation.

I think the issue is still size, as well as a more general audience. Mastodon is nowhere near as large as twitter, but I wouldn't be surprised if it still has more users (not necessarily more conversation) than the Usenet days ever had. And of course that demographic will be very different from those in the 90's.

we can go back to old tech. Really hard to go back to old culture.

It's funny. We yearn for the days when everybody had a quirky website at ~username on their university server, but all those sites disappeared when you graduated.

> This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

Are you paying for it? I've been using omg.lol for some time and I'm not concerned about that mastodon instance disappearing anytime soon.

> Are you paying for it?

I've been donating to the instance, yes. Although the reason this time is to do with UK's new laws on social media sites.

> I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

This will keep happening until people realize that:

- there is a significant cost to properly manage an instance

- there is a significant cost to develop sustainably the software

- there is a significant cost to deal with moderation

and that these costs can not be covered by donations from a small minority.

moderation aside, is the cost any different from any other site you can host on?

Single-user instances, maybe not. But running a Mastodon instance for a couple of thousand people is a lot more resource intensive than running a blog or a XMPP server for the same amount of users.

Something about fool me once or twice, but fool me six times.

>my instance is shutting down in January. I have no way to migrate my posts. This is the sixth time I've gone through this over the years. I don't feel like dealing with this stuff anymore.

I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub? that your comments aren't contained on any one instance and are yours to move around.

And why is your instance shutting down?

-----

from link:

>I can probably count on one hand the number of times I had to block people because, get this, Twitter had a quality filter which caught most insufferable people

I guess "had" is the underrated word there. But even then I'm confused. There were entire curated block lists made because some people were so pervasive in so many circles while skirting the rules.

>My needs and experience here are likely VERY different from yours. At this point, they're often too different to reconcile.

Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net. Strictly moderated popular forums just isn't a thing on the modern net. You need to go to a less popular, lower traffic place for such management.

Posts are identified by URL, so if the URL is gone, the post is gone.

> I thought that was the whole point of ActivityPub?

To allow others to see your posts, yes.

But if your instance goes away, instances can't fetch those posts anymore and admins of Mastodon instances shutting down tend to run a process that prunes users/history across the fedi too. Even if they don't, that information fades, especially as status authentication is a thing now (checks original instance for the post existence).

Then further, if you move to another server, that history is not attached to your new account either etc.

> And why is your instance shutting down?

This time it's due to new laws that the UK has introduced around social media websites. Previously it's been stuff like admin didn't want to do it after getting bullied. Not enough money. Lost all data and can't be bothered anymore etc.

> I guess "had" is the underrated word there.

I don't believe he's on Twitter anymore.

> Sure, but I' wondering if that need will be met anywhere on the net.

I believe this is currently handled by "algorithms" on the major social media networks.

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