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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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?
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
“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.”
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
There will and probably already are server implementations that are resource minimal and easy setup. There's nothing about ActivityPub that stops this.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
336 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadI 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....
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.
[1] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/4486
[2] https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/23662
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.
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.
A Raspberry Pi?
https://github.com/guysoft/PleromaPi
(Sadly no AkkomaPi yet, it seems.)
> 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
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.
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.
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?
I'll take suggestions for a better (easy, cheap or free, functional, familiar) small community platform?
1) https://libquotes.com/bruce-schneier/quote/lbx8x8g
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.
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.
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.
It's quite normal.
Fun to see this posted on a pretty niche but very active site which covers probably a small proportion of your social circle.
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.
With all of their downsides, it's only huge social networks that actually brought the vast majority of people to the internet at all.
It was thriving for me, and I was barely a teenager at the time.
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.
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.
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.
(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)
The nice thing about a federated system is that it's ONE app to talk to 20 slightly different groups of people.
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.
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.
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 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.
literally posting this to the HN audience...
Says the post on a thriving discussion forum that isn't even a social network. Quality has a quality all of its own.
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.
You are saying this on Hackernews, out of all places... which is an example of one.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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?
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.
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.
The strength and weakness of Twitter was dumping "everyone" into a very flat network. Increasingly that just sets people at war with each other.
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
1. Why was HN founded, and;
2. Why did Reddit create the subreddit?
Unnecessary hint: Both questions have the same answer.
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.
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.
for example, i'm not on tiktok but i still see tiktok content everyday on twitter, instagram, and reddit. and sometimes the news.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
Mastodon is the most popular implementation currently, but there are many other implementations in the fediverse
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.
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).
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.
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.
Which I think is a good thing, and it's also how it was before, on the BBS/Forums days.
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.
What does doomed mean then, Justin?
For contrast, "No VC will dump loads of money into it" isn't exactly a gloomy forecast.
I can't imagine discussing twitter in the early days and how users / communities have to manage servers / are shutting down, etc.
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'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.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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/
YMMV, obvs.
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.
“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.”
pleroma?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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 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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Is there something inherit in Mastodon that makes it more complicated, or is this an obstacle that can be overcome (like email did)
I'm writing a very basic social media app, myself, right now, and have developed an appreciation for the complexity behind the façade.
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.
Not anymore and less each day. Twitter is no longer a valid choice for a lot of people.
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.
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. ]
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).
As far moderation, that's a harder thing to handle. Don't know really.
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.
Why is there no income potential? 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...
I'm on a canadian coop instance that launched a few months ago (@jszym@cosocial.ca). If you're a cannuck, consider joining!
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
"some instances shut down", "there might be a CVE and everyone will reevaluate", "moderation isn't centralized"
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.
Remember they switched out the core engine of mongo as well (wild tiger) and then it became a lot less of a joke.
I am on Mastodon and get a lot of engagement these days.
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.
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.
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.
That’s apart of how this whole infection started…
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.