Hacker News Reader

Comment by maelito | Hacker News Reader

Maybe they realized Mastodon has no real migration from one instance to another, ant that it's been a criticized limitation since 2019.

Edit : people answering my message probably think as I did that Mastodon enables messages migration (your posts), but no. The "fediverse" doesn't allow you to migrate your posts with your profile migration. It's like keeping your android contacts but losing all your photos. Well more precisely, they're on this old hard drive, you can't show them to your friends and the hard drive can disappear anytime.

2019 issue with 500 likes, core team doesn't care much. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423

View on HN

IMHO this is an absolutely fatal design flaw. It means that if it were to become very popular eventually the largest instances would take over the network due to network effects. ActivityPub has eventual centralization baked in.

Nostr is closer to a real decentralized social network, though it has other problems. Chief among these is trying to be Twitter, which has always been a model of interaction that lends itself to obnoxiousness. This was also a problem with Mastodon. If we're trying to do better, we should not be trying to duplicate a toxic environment. Still Nostr is architecturally superior.

Can you expand on the Nostr problems? Honest question. I mostly see it trying to offer another (architecturally better and robust to censorship) mechanism for group communication.

I think (hope, TBH) that Nostr can fill the niche of the Usenet of the past where some groups did slide into obnoxiousness but others maintained intelligent and thoughtful discussions for many years. My 2c.

I always liked the reddit post-scarcity solution to this -- make it as easy as possible to fork / start a new community.

Users will vote with their feet.

What was required to start a new usenet domain? (a bit before my time)

> What was required to start a new usenet domain?

Assuming you mean a new newsgroup (discussion forum for a single topic e.g. comp.lang.lisp):

- If you wanted it in the Big 8 hierarchy, you had to campaign for it and get support and prove it would have traffic.

- If you wanted it in alt.*, you just posted a control message (and then everyone ignored your group)

Or you could make your own hierarchy but it's up to each individual server which hierarchies they carry.

Nostr is not trying to be Twitter; Nostr the protocol is more generalized than that. It just so happens that a lot of people want a Twitter alternative right now, so that's a popular Nostr webapp to make.

There is also Nostr chess, Nostr podcasting, Nostr marketplaces, Nostr data vending machines, Nostr blogs, and more. See https://nostrapps.com/ for a sample of what people are making.

Don't be a digital serf, run your own instance.

Personally I would start here, not because it is good but because it is simple.

https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/honk

Why would you go through the trouble, when nobody else is doing that, because the success of the system is highly dependent on network effects?

These things have first-mover disadvantage, and last-mover advantage.

But it's not dependent on network effects, you can follow people and they can follow back even if you run your own server.

You miss being in the explore tab but I don't think that's the main source of traffic, and various bots or groups that re-share toots will likely spread your account far and wide.

You can't expect most people to run their own instance, there needs to be a more user-friendly way to migrate accounts.

My understanding has been that the design of Mastodon is such that this is not universalizable—if everyone ran their own instance every instance would end up with too much traffic and drown. Is this understanding wrong?

This kind of attitude is the reason Mastodon will never be attractive to a lot of people who might otherwise be interested in it.

The same people who have their whole lives on a free @gmail.com account with zero plan for what to do if that account goes away? The problem is real in any event, it's just a question of whether you care enough to do something about it. And if you don't care enough to do something about it for email, then you might as well not worry about it for Mastodon.

I'm sorry but I'm 100 % involved in a big open source project (rebuilding google maps).

Why would I spend time hosting an instance of mastodon ? I'm happy to pay for it.

Bluesky says it's 10 cents per user per year. Happy to pay for this.

What exactly do you mean? I migrated from one instance to another without problem, and all my followers/followings came over without an issue.

Only if your old instance still exists and cooperates.

I can totally see instance admins denying a transfer after banning you (because if they banned you they probably would like to punish you further).

Worse : my old instance had its backup down for months.

Also, no GIF support. I asked the admin if he was wanting to get my help, or some funds to help for the servers. Said no.

Imagine : to get GIF support by switching instance, I would lose my posts.

After I did the migration, we talked, the backup worked again.

Couldn't even see his answers nor thank him, since once the migration is acted you lose access to your past discussions.

Disclosure : my account was censored, I did not respect one of the "laws" specific to the instance.

> Disclosure : my account was censored, I did not respect one of the "laws" specific to the instance.

In the early 2000s, hackers were staunch defenders of free speech. The internet was a safe space from an often conservative and religiously Puritanical "meat space".

Now that the pendulum has swung, a majority seemingly wants to shut down the things and the people that they disagree with. Moreover, the accepted social behavior encourages this kind of hate and range and spite. It's even been gamified.

In many ways, the future turned out a lot worse than I'd hoped for. This is certainly one of the things I loathe.

Here is another perspective: In the 2000s, many of us were children and teens. Now we’re not, and definitely don’t want our own kids to be exposed to the same Internet as we were back then…

People romanticize that time way more than it deserves.

I’m not a fan of censorship, but there’s a case to be made for reasonable adults deciding the ground rules. Case in point: Twitter.

> Now we’re not, and definitely don’t want our own kids to be exposed to the same Internet as we were back then…

Eehhh speak for yourself. I wish the young generation could experience the free and open and wild Internet that I did in the 90s and 00s...

Now they're stuck with ~10 websites run by giant megacorporations and "adults deciding the ground rules"...

Give the kids some credit, they're smarter than you think..

>I wish the young generation could experience the free and open and wild Internet that I did in the 90s and 00s...

Those were exhilarating and heady times for many teenagers and children, to be sure, but you don't have any children of your own, do you?

I have kids and I wish they could have the old web, warts and all it was a much better place for learning and connecting than what we have now.

I run a Mastodon server and I'm quick to moderate things that I'd probably want a monolithic service like Twitter or Facebook to allow. We're a smallish community of like-minded people, and the people on my server repeatedly tell me they like my moderation policies. If they didn't, I'd change them to match the community's mores.

But here's the deal: while I can and do moderate what passes through my server, there's absolutely nothing I can do about how you run yours. I'm not telling anyone they can't say certain things. I'm telling them they need to say it somewhere else.

By analogy, it's probably closer to a message board. If I were running a board for physicists, I feel absolutely zero obligation to allow crackpots to post anti-science nonsense and yell at the scientists there. They can go make their own message board, or Mastodon instance, if they want to say those things.

It would be strictly better without middlemen.

There is always going to be some percentage of interest overlap between users that gets destroyed by federated moderation. It's too coarse grained and ruins the decentralized possibilities of the internet.

That isn't to say that users shouldn't be able to filter out whatever they dislike. Rather, it would be best if that was a user's choice [1].

I participate in LGBT spaces, but I'm not going to block people for playing Harry Potter. I don't appreciate people stepping in my way to censor things they think I shouldn't see or hear.

To make an analogy with Reddit, if I make a comment in r/conservative (without necessarily even subscribing to their ideology), I get banned from dozens of other subreddits via automated moderation tools. That's a lot like how Mastodon thinks the world should work. But that's not how people are or should be.

Mastodon (and subreddit mods) think everyone should wear a membership pin or be emblazoned with a Scarlet Letter. That's incredibly harmful to people and is leading to increasing polarization in society.

[1] I'm sure that could even be done at scale by subscribing to community block lists. It shouldn't be a hassle, it just shouldn't be centrally planned and executed with no recourse from the end users.

In the early 2000s people were regularly banned from various phpBB forums because a moderator was a bit of a dick.

> I can totally see instance admins denying a transfer after banning you (because if they banned you they probably would like to punish you further).

This is the fucked up problem with federation and it's why we need true peer-to-peer social media.

Instead of corporate ideological kowtowing, now it's a thousand little fiefdoms of tiny tyrants deciding if you pattern fit to the ascribed dogma.

I could see things swinging back to an IndieWeb-style setup where we have blogs that can ping each other. I have my own blog hosted on micro.blog for exactly that reason. I can follow other peoples posts as if they were posting to Twitter or something, reply to them, see their replies, etc., and ultimately I own 100% of my content and can move it to any other blog software at any time. Maybe this is the way.

That's sort of the idea with Bluesky isn't it?

Your profile includes your posts and all your data, and you are free to move it around, back it up, host it wherever you want, etc... But all the posts are federated together.

I haven't looked at it closely in a while but I know they're still growing slowly but steadily..

Yes, I've switched to Bluesky. After investigating their protocols, Bluesky fits my needs way better. I'm quite convinced now Mastodon will never leave the tech sphere.

You've lost your posts.

Of course keeping your followers is important. But having a new empty wall was a real problem for me.

I didn't know it. Nobody told me, from the people to the interface that I would lose my 3500 messages. It's like having your blog content on another domain in the hands of another host, that can shut your old page down when he wants.

It's the perfect walled garden in terms of content.

Also, the instance where I was had its backup feature down for months. Finally, the followers migration failed at 80 %.

Is this doc page incorrect, https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...

> On this page you can also download a copy of your archive that can be read by any ActivityPub software. This archive includes all of your posts and media. So even if the instance that you are moving from shuts down, as is the case with KNZK, you will still have a copy of all of your posts!

The problem is you want all those old posts to be associated with the new (migrated) account on the new instance and be hosted there.

Sure, being able to get an archive is nice.

Presumably it's not a technical limitation, since an importer could be written and added by some instances, even if not accepted upstream.

If the lack of import is caused by policy conflict or cost for administrators to review bulk-imported content, does this encourage individuals to have a paid instance to aggregate historical content, e.g. https://masto.host.

This is just a legal requirement in the EU. Nothing more. It doesn't make this archive useful.

> You've lost your posts.

A couple of solutions: (a) post them on a website and put a link in your new Mastodon profile, or (b) use something like mastodon.py https://mastodonpy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html to post them to your new account.

Does it copy over all the comments and interactions as well?

Does the old server redirect to your new account if someone linked to your old post(s) from somewhere else?

It's a migration for the future, not a migration of your past content - understandable because that past content likely has references from other instances and pushing those changes across would be a heavy operation, unreliable, and probably fraught with potential security problems.

I believe for retaining content it's pretty much retaining it for yourself by downloading an archive, though some instances may allow uploading that. There's also at least one browser-based web app that lets you open and view the content of that archive - otherwise it's kind of useless.

Edit: https://github.com/zero-mstd/mav-z

> It's a migration for the future, not a migration of your past content - understandable because that past content likely has references from other instances and pushing those changes across would be a heavy operation, unreliable, and probably fraught with potential security problems.

Yes of course I'm getting the technical and conceptual difficulties as a developer, but it's awful UX. It's a real deal breaker once you discover it. You cannot use Mastodon as your primary content database anymore.

It’s a social network. Do you expect Facebook or Twitter to be your primary content database?

But I do agree UX could and should be better

I think most people expect their Facebook and Twitter posts to be around in 5 years.

I don’t. It’s naive to believe any social network is in it for the long haul. Too many have failed to believe they won’t as well. Particularly, exitter.

It’s best to assume anything you don’t host yourself is ephemeral.

And yet, I have Facebook posts that will be 20 years old next year. The attitude that “I’m distrusting of social media, therefore this major adoption blocker is fine as it exists” is why only techies have managed to adopt Mastodon, and is why that will be the limits of its adoption.

It's then less like comfortable moving and more like fleeing or going on exile. You're happy to be still alive but you've lost all you had.

Migration for the future, LOL. Like stepping off a boat, with a suitcase and the shirt on your back. Except it's just another third world country, from which you will have to do it all over again.

For people fleeing the rise of extremist content on Xitter, that seems an oddly appropriate analogy.

Yes, unlike every other social network. Or email. Or SMS. Or any other chat. Etc.

Wow, I had no idea. This means migration is next to useless.

The people responding to you saying this is expected are missing the point.

> This means migration is next to useless.

Well not completely. Lots of people see microblogging as the daily rant, the cat pictures. For them, it's not a big problem.

But for people like me that use microbloging as a way to publish content, that use the search feature quite often to retrieve past thoughts, past links, etc it's a fatal flaw, like other users told it.

Not to mention search itself being fundamentally broken in Mastodon - there is no way to search all servers at once, you will always only see what the instance you're searching on has ingested into its cache. There's no trending topics or if there is, it's outdated and/or unmoderated.

On top of that... instance mods powertripping is another issue. I don't care on which side of that godforsaken war in Israel/Palestine two different instance moderators are. But I do care when one of these morons drags in their user base into this bitch fight and decides to defederate from the instance ran by the other dude and suddenly I can't interact with a follower any more, I don't even get a warning "hey, you can't see posts from XYZ any more because their instance defederated from ours".

While I'd love to see Mastodon succeed at least in survival, it suffers from a bunch of very fundamental design and concept issues.

I strongly recommend looking at something like IndieWeb's POSSE. You post to your main blog, and some automation automatically crossposts it to Mastodon (or Twitter or ...).

The biggest problem with making Mastodon better is exactly that: anyone who dares suggest the way it's always been has a flaw will quickly be shouted down by people telling them that they're an idiot who clearly doesn't understand that the shortcoming is a feature.

We are on a forum, having a discussion. Not everyone disagreeing is someone shouting you down. Nobody called each other an idiot here.

Have you expressed disagreement with a duly sworn officer of the Mastodon HOA before? Because they definitely like to yell at and call people with whom they disagree idiots.

It is, frankly, a very unwelcoming place.

But maybe for them it's a feature. It keeps the microblog content in a particular shape, like daily chat but not too-serious, long-term-valuable content.

Clearly there's a market for both. And maybe they could even be... confederated? That is, it might be possible to combine several sources in your stream, and accept identities across servers for easy commenting. Heh, this all awfully reminds me of the stuff that was already built in early 2000s, with RSS/Atom, the original OpenID, and no huge corporations interested in taking over these small potatoes.

The migration issue is why I've never bothered with the "fediverse/mastodon".

The other one is choosing a server. That's actually a critical first step that most don't really understand about the "fediverse". Just looking over the "rules" of mozilla.social is insufferable and a non-starter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com