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Mastodon.technology Shutdown

• BaldricksGhost 4y ago
  Sorry to hear this. Family must come first. The mastodon.technology had some interesting folks. I've migrated my account to the mastodon.social instance. Moving accounts on Mastodon is pretty easy so that's a positive.
• BiggsHoson 4y ago
  I was not part of your community, but thank you for what you've done with it. May you have all the needed grace, patience, wisdom, and strength (both physical and mental) to navigate this next stage of your life in caring for someone who needs you more than ever right now.
• preseinger 4y ago
  This is predictable. A Mastodon instance, last I checked, involved installing a constellation of a half-dozen databases and services. That's insane. It should be a single binary.
  • gargron 4y ago
    PostgreSQL and Redis are a constellation of half-dozen databases?
    • preseinger 4y ago
      Sorry, I wasn't precise: it's two databases (Postgres, Redis), an HTTP frontend (nginx) and specific versions of two interpreted language runtimes (Ruby, Node). The point stands.
      • gargron 4y ago
        While Mastodon can be used for small server purposes (e.g. server-of-one) it is really geared towards professional use - providing a service to thousands of users and scaling up horizontally. Looking beyond technical requirements, so many of Mastodon's features echo this -- account management, reporting, moderation. In that context, I really do not think that "uses a reverse proxy in the front" and "has a database and a cache store" is a factor.
        • preseinger 4y ago
          > While Mastodon can be used for small server purposes (e.g. server-of-one) it is really geared towards professional use - providing a service to thousands of users and scaling up horizontally. Mastodon advertises itself as being a self-hosted project. > Your *self-hosted*, globally interconnected microblogging community https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon -- > I really do not think that "uses a reverse proxy in the front" and "has a database and a cache store" is a factor. These things matter at scale, but the typical Mastodon instance comes nowhere near that scale. A reverse proxy is relevant beyond O(10k) RPS; less than that, and a single process directly serving requests is more suitable. A separate database is relevant beyond O(10M) records; less than that, and any embedded DB, or, frankly, direct filesystem access with any encoding format, is more suitable. A caching layer is relevant at the next order of magnitude for both of those dimensions; less than that, and there's no need. Mastodon should, by default, ship as a single binary, statically compiled, with no runtime language requirements, and should manage its data storage requirements directly to disk.
          • gargron 4y ago
            It is self-hosted because you can host it yourself.
            • preseinger 4y ago
              Well, all software on GitHub, more or less, satisfies this definition, so I don't think it's what was meant.
              • Nemo_bis 4y ago
                Not "all software on GitHub" because most of that is proprietary. To run it yourself it generally needs to be [free software](https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/ https://fsfe.org/freesoftware/).
                • preseinger 4y ago
• bombcar 4y ago
  Maybe things aren't meant to live forever; perhaps trying to make the ephemeral internet tied to long-lived permanent identities is the fundamental mistake.
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  > A member of my family was very recently diagnosed with a terminal illness. I am doing everything I can to support them. I am sorry to hear that, but I can totally support them, and sincerely wish them the best of luck, dealing with a pretty awful situation.
• spiderfarmer 4y ago
  > The server has also gotten too large and too complex for me to administer. I always suspected this would be a massive problem with Mastodon. I contemplated running a server, but there's no way to know beforehand when you'll be running into a limit, like cost or time. Can you really build a social network on volunteers that invest their own money and time, with little reward?
  • berkes 4y ago
    The tech also doesn't help. It's a "typical" Rails application: large, convoluted, lot's of moving parts, and services, and generally slow as molasses (solved by throwing more hardware at it). As experienced Rails dev(ops), I managed to run and help run an instance, but it's not something done on a friday afternoon, let alone scale up. What we really need in this landscape is dead simple services. I'm thinking about the difference between setting up a gitlab or a gitea. The first is Rails, needs ruby, gems, bundler, workers, database server, redis, mailserver and whatnot. And thats for manually installing on a server - no pipeline or anything to manage future changes. The second a single binary (pre compiled from a go codebase) everything statically linked (even sqlite is built in, with option to upgrade to postgres). Plop it on a server start it and go. For an intranet you might even skip putting a server/https in front, just run on exposed ports. We can dockerize all the ruby-stuff, but that might make it easier, it doesn't make it simpler, it really makes it more complex. And the performance-issues aren't solved. The fediverse needs this as well: just plop a binary on your VPS or homeserver and you're running. Such lean and simple servers are being worked on, but Mastodon itself is a huge, slow and hairy beast.
    • noirscape 4y ago
      There are plenty of other choices. Pleroma[1] is probably the biggest competitor and is lightweight enough that you can deploy it on a raspberry pi. It's written in Elixir which takes a bit to set up, but the devs offer OTP releases that don't require you to have Elixir installed to use it and are the closest to "single file" deployment you get. Resourcewise it takes up only a fraction of what Mastodon demands in terms of memory & cpu usage. DB backend is postgres. It's also by default far less cache heavy than Mastodon (which caches every external attachment, avatar and header locally, which causes a lot of issues since it's the main reason instances run out of disk space). Featurewise it actually surpasses Mastodon on almost everything except for not offering a tweetdeck-like UI. [1]: https://pleroma.social/ https://pleroma.social/
• inglor 4y ago
  Thank you for your volunteering and I hope your family member gets better Ash. I think it’s unfortunate for us users but at least on an open source platform migrating to a new instance is possible. That said - this will be a hit to the community. It just shows how relying on infrastructure with a low bus factor is risky and something for future attempts to consider.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
    > relying on infrastructure with a low bus factor is risky There are risks to every "bus factor," but I can totally get behind requiring a team of a certain size to be behind whatever infrastructure I rely on. Most of my dependencies have a bus factor of 1 (Yours Troolie), as I write packages for my own consumption. They are really, really good modules, and I publish them as general-purpose modules, but don't expect people (other than me) to really use them. I did write a fairly massive infrastructure project, and managed it, alone, for ten years, then it was taken over by a team, and "went viral," in a sense. The best thing I ever did for that project, was toss the keys to the new team, and walk away. It's in very good shape, now.
• k__ 4y ago
  What do you think is the main issue with Mastodon not really getting mainstream adoption? Not different enough than Twitter or too different from it? Not enough marketing? Bad UX?
  • rvz 4y ago
    All of the above, plus little to no-one actually bothered to use it daily, with not enough users to even talk to and compared to Twitter, Mastodon has an extremely limited network effect. This explains why they have keep pulling content from and why they keep using Twitter and not the other way round.
    • shadowfacts 4y ago
      Lots of people use it every day: myself, the people I follow, a lot of people who follow me, countless others I don’t interact with. Yes, the network has few users compared to twitter, but it’s a far cry from “little to no-one”.
    • gargron 4y ago
      Mastodon does not pull content from Twitter.
      • rvz 4y ago
        No, Mastodon 'users' have to keep linking tweets from Twitter in Mastodon more frequently and it is not the other way round on Twitter.
  • Macha 4y ago
    Network effects of twitter. Your friends are already on twitter if they still use this style of broadcast text based social media. Also recent privacy concerns and less recent issues with internet hostility means we're already past peak twitter, so mastodon is having to break into a declining market.
    • k__ 4y ago
• de6u99er 4y ago
  Thanks for everything qnd all the best!
• Barrin92 4y ago
  >Why Not Transfer to a New Admin? Users have put their trust in me with their data. Choosing a new admin would require a massive amount of trust, since they’d have access to over a half decade of user data. Not just data from my local users, but from users they have interacted with. I think that's a very salient and responsible choice. With the freenode debacle coming to mind immediately I think it's important to remember how risky a change of ownership can be in particular if the users are not aware of it. Certainly a painful decision to shut the instance down, but a decision with a lot of foresight. An active migration might create disarray but it also forces people to make an active choice to trust another host.
  • pookha 4y ago
    I don't at all think this is a reasonable choice. A group of like minded adults should be able to establish some form of stewardship. it's the basis for human civilization. That said the maintainer has my sincere prayers for his family and for his path in life.
• rglullis 4y ago
  On the one hand, I am sad to hear about it and even more so due to the circumstances. On the other, I feel a bit validated in my belief that we need to have professionally managed instances on the fediverse. "Community Support" only goes so far. Thousands of people using a service, but how many of them actually help with its upkeep? I know that my instance has only a handful of paying users, and it is barely paying for itself, and far from paying all the work that I've put into it. But charging for access brings a lot of benefits: it keeps spammers and bots away, it is a good filter against trolls and best of all makes it explicit what is expected of all parties.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something. Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth" and so on, looking at you AWS).
    • sneak 4y ago
      $1500/mo does not even begin to cover a single 24/7 oncall devops person’s rate.
      • bilbo0s 4y ago
        I think capableweb's comment is an unintentionally good example of the fact that a lot of people don't understand how much it takes to run these sorts of things. The comment was in the dimension of money, but I'm sure there is a similar lack of information attending the dimensions of people and time as well.
        • capableweb 4y ago
          I think bilbo0s's comment is an unintentionally good example of the fact that a lot of people don't understand how little it takes to run these sort of things if you know what you're doing. "The cloud" has ruined people thinking that everything has to cost 10x or even 100x compared to what it would cost if you just spend some time learning about administration yourself and set up a dedicated instance instead of using anything cloud. As an exercise, without looking it up beforehand, what kind of hardware do you think HN runs on and how much they pay for that per month? Also, $1500/month is a proper salary in many places in the world. Not everyone lives in a metropolitan city where wages tend to be much, much higher.
• noirscape 4y ago
  Aw man. That sucks but it's totally understandable. Mastodon.technology was the first instance I ever joined back when someone told me what the fediverse was. I eventually left because I wanted to selfhost, but the general warm reception I got on that instance made me think the fediverse could really go places. Best of luck in the future and best of luck with your family.
• HankB99 4y ago
  Ash: I'm sorry to hear about the health issue that precipitated this. I wish you the best outcome but realize that that does not always happen. Rest: As someone who does not (yet) use Mastodon, I'm curious about the impact of a single node shutting down. At least in this case this is happening in an orderly manner and with warning. I'm also curious if this is a problem with Mastodon in general or did this particular node just become too popular for its own good. I seem to recall that some instances (Adam Curry's No Agenda related instance) limiting membership. Or perhaps I'm thinking of something else. But that may not help if the problem is traffic generated by the entire network as seems to be hinted at in the post. Please excuse my ignorance of how Mastodon operates that may be implicit in my questions.
  • berkes 4y ago
    Mastodon has a migration path for users to move to other instances. So when the server admins allow it (i.e. don't just shutdown, or kick someone off) moving is rather easy. Today, several in my mastodon timeline mentioned they finished the move. But without them mentioning, I, an outstander (i'm on another instance) wouldn't notice it. What will happen, though, is that a portion of the users won't migrate. Either because they forget, or they can't be bothered, are "zombie accounts", or because its too challenging: it does involve down- and uploading and/or copypasting zips/datafiles. This means a bit of pruning or culling, and that could be considered good, IDK. What will also happen, on a more technical level, is that other instances and maybe bots and automation will hit timeouts and connection errors when it really shuts down. Most instances and fediverse software can handle this just fine, it's built with this mind; it might at most cause some overhead and load. Some flakey or poorly developed software might crash or break (for a moment).
    • bondarchuk 4y ago
      Wouldn't it make sense for there to be a cryptographic verification based on a private key held by the user, so that they can prove to other servers/users that they are the same account as one that existed on a server that has shut down already? Is there something like that in Mastodon?
• somehnacct3757 4y ago
  This is why I haven't gotten into mastodon. What server do I choose? At best they're internet forums from the 90s where the admin eventually has to move on (for often valid reasons, like in this case.) Also why does this random guy have MY data? Why does he need to trust a new admin with my data for a succession plan to be possible? I don't worry about any of this with my RSS feed. Mastodon federated at the wrong granularity.
  • yellow_lead 4y ago
    Well, where do you expect your data to be stored? In the ether?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • somehnacct3757 4y ago
      On a server that I personally own or rent. Why does my data need to be anywhere else?
      • 3371 4y ago
        Oh, you sound like exactly a new fediverse user.
      • shadowfacts 4y ago
        So then run an instance yourself on your own server?
      • yellow_lead 4y ago
        Well, don't use someone else's instance then. Boom, solved.
  • rglullis 4y ago
    If you don't trust anyone with your data, just host it yourself.
  • 4y ago
• lorealpnis 4y ago
  Is "migrating to another server" as simple as singing up on other servers? Or is there a different straightforward way?
  • fleg 4y ago
    Moving to another instance is pretty easy: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#migration It doesn't move your toots, but followers don't have to do anything to still follow you on your new account.
    • thrdbndndn 4y ago
      > It doesn't move your toots does that even count as migrating then
      • fleg 4y ago
        I think yes, but if you really want, then you can migrate your toots by exporting them from the old instance and importing on the new one: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-one-server-to-another/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/06/how-to-migrate-from-on...
      • smcn 4y ago
        Of course it does, but I do agree that it would be better if it did.
        • thrdbndndn 4y ago
          No seriously, I'm not being sarcastic. You can't call keeping merely the contacts without emails themselves "migration of email provider". It makes no sense. Also, you said "follower[s] don't have to do anything", but somehow you (the followee) on the other hand needs to actively move? What if my follower is on this instance too and they don't actively move? Shouldn't their account disappear (and you lost your follower)? I genuinely don't understand how it would work other than everyone has to manually move together.
• proactivesvcs 4y ago
  This is one of the strengths of a federated system run by people who aren't looking to profit. Firstly, they care about their users and are more likely to take difficult decisions, like the one Ash has made, for the good of themselves and their users. In doing so everyone involved has time to make an orderly move. Secondly, the service survives. Mastodon didn't shut down. The Fediverse didn't close. One beloved instance bows out and whilst it is a loss to many, their network endures as they thank the admin(s) and move on. You think this shows a disadvantage compared to twitter? Let's talk once twitter shuts down. Because it will. How will your argument hold up when f*c*book finishes dying? We'll find out soon enough. Or how about when a telecoms/media conglomerate buys out flickr or tumblr and puts a stake through their heart? Oh, that already happened. This is a bittersweet testament to exactly how the Internet should be built: on the foundations of openness, community and decentralisation.
  • gbro3n 4y ago
    Though not a social service, the recent shutdown of Stadia is likely indicative of how corporate shut downs will be handled.
  • cmeacham98 4y ago
    Look, I like open source federated ecosystems like Mastodon, but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. I'm not sure I could reliably predict whether Twitter or Mastodon will live longer.
    • romeros 4y ago
      Orkut was super successful and was eventually shutdown.. Meta will live on forever but facebook might well be a relic of the past. Most people don't even log into facebook anymore than a few times a year.
    • SkyMarshal 4y ago
      >but claiming Twitter or Facebook will be shut down any time soon is laughable. He didn't say "anytime soon", you added that part.
• bscphil 4y ago
  Reminds me of a point I made about Pinboard. It's surprising to me that despite the success of open source software we haven't developed good systems for community administration of public services. Web services that aren't owned by large companies tend to be run with a bus factor of 1. > I bring this up because this kind of thing arises in open source software development as well. For instance, when the developer of htop disappeared for a while, and the community forked it. But we (Internet culture) have not developed the same approaches to handling administration of services that are useful to a group of people. This surprises me. I think there's room for some movement in this direction, where a group of people can maintain a service that is useful to them and made available to the whole group. Perhaps various chat servers / Mastodon approximate this, but even in this case they're often run by individuals and susceptible to the same kinds of outages. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26200441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26200441
  • nixpulvis 4y ago
    Public services like this have private databases, and owned domains. Both of which require clear plans for stewardship if you want to avoid these issues. Much like a non-profit still needs some organization and roles assigned to it's members, so too do FOSS (services).
• leashless 4y ago
  Why the hell doesn't Mastadon encrypt data at rest so the admins aren't responsible for user privacy? What the hell? Is this the 1990s?
  • detaro 4y ago
    I don't think "encryption at rest" is what you want, because it doesn't help you against the admin if the app still can/has to be able to decrypt it? Encryption at rest protects against someone walking away with the database, not an admin.
    • Xeoncross 4y ago
      Encryption isn't mentioned once in the whole Activity Pub spec. Encryption at rest isn't good enough. E2E should be the default on federated protocols with breakouts for public content only needing to be signed.
      • mariusor 4y ago
        ActivityPub is a transport protocol. The content of an ActivityPub object can be anything, including a stream of bytes coming from an E2E encrypted exchange.
        • Xeoncross 4y ago
          I disagree, ActivityPub is closely intertwined[1] with ActivityStreams[2] and expose all the actions and intents of the sender as part of the protocol. 1: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#like-activity-outbox https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#like-activity-outbox 2: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/ https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-core/
          • mariusor 4y ago
            First of all, I must clarify that I didn't truly address your initial statement, that "all" ActivityPub elements should be E2E encrypted, which is a notion that I find absurd, because it increases the complexity at least an order of magnitude and except "Create", no other activity in the specification has side effects that pass "content" between servers. In my opinion the only part of an ActivityPub request that can be sensitive and could require encryption are dereferenced objects inlined in a "Create" activity. What I addressed with my (granted too terse answer) was that E2E communication is actually possible, but it would require one of the following options: A "Create" Activity can wrap any type of object that has a JSON-LD document describing it (the ActivityStreams vocabulary is extensible[1]) so adding a new "E2EEncryptedMessage" object that contains all the properties required (and which are not already exposed in the existing vocabulary, eg, public keys which exist for the actors that participate in the exchange) in such a communication is possible. As long as all the information required for E2E can be encoded fully at each communication step (ie, nothing needs to be communicated off-band) everything will behave as expected for the clients that support this protocol extension. Another option would be to piggy back on existing Object types like "Document" and encode a full E2E payload in it's "Content" to obtain a similar effect but with less expressiveness from a ActivityPub point of view. This probably needs a custom "MimeType" to accompany it so other clients can avoid processing these objects. In conclusion, that's what I meant by having ActivityPub behave like "wire protocol", and apologies if I created confusion. [1] https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#extendedtypes https://www.w3.org/TR/activitystreams-vocabulary/#extendedty...
• tootie 4y ago
  The solution to silicon valley hegemony just isn't decentralization. It's non-profit leadership. Think Wikipedia. Think NPR. The model doesn't even really need to change from an ad-based revenue model so long as there isn't a bullwhip at the backs of execs demands grow or die. Just keep revenue as close to break even as possible with enough cushion for a downturn.
  • guywithahat 4y ago
    I don't think Wikipedia and NPR have aged that well though, there are lots of topics where they're essentially (or literally) paid propaganda for their major donors and because they're a non-profit it's less clear what's what than if they had paid advertisements
    • blep_ 4y ago
      Do you have examples?
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        Current Affairs recently ran "NPR Is Not Your Friend", which highlights some of the issues: <https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-friend https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/npr-is-not-your-frien...> The upshot of that piece is that NPR itself remains part of the neoliberal ideological propaganda apparatus: Like all press outlets, NPR has a particular point of view. Its bias is just as profound as the likes of MSNBC or Fox News. NPR’s ideological bias is toward what we might call the American bipartisan consensus. My sense is that both NPR and Wikipedia have performed admirably, and far better than their commercial counterparts, but that there remain pitfalls with both any organisation and those which are based on nonprofit / NGO models, particularly in terms of sponsor / donor capture. The NonProfit Quarterly's podcast Tiny Spark frequently discusses such issues. It seems to be on hiatus but its back-catalogue has numerous episodes dedicated to the topic: <https://nonprofitquarterly.org/tiny-spark/ https://nonprofitquarterly.org/tiny-spark/> One of the voices heard several times on that topic has been Rob Reich of Stanford (not to be confused with former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich, at UC Berkeley), who's written and spoken on issues of philanthropy. Several articles are listed in his ... Wikipedia ... bio: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reich#Articles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rob_Reich#Articles> I suspect that the OP had another take on this, which I find less credible.
• sneak 4y ago
• throwawayKiwi9 4y ago
  At least from a design perspective, I would highly encourage users to check out Secure Scuttlebutt. It solves many problems highlighted here. Dominic Tarr really did some excellent work building it.
• samatman 4y ago
  My condolences to the admin, this is sad news. This strengthens my conviction that federation is a bad architecture for something like Mastodon. A fully distributed system, urbit being the easiest to try right now, can't stick someone with the responsibility to keep a bunch of other people online. It can't stick those people with the responsibility to move off the server. Each user runs a server process, locally or on a remote machine. If any of those goes offline, all the services and data it was providing are gone, but no other user accounts are affected. Federation works fine for Matrix, although I still think the full peer architecture will dominate long-term. It's less disruptive to something like chat to switch user names because a homeserver shuts down. Mastodon instances get linked into, and all those links are going to break. Running a redirect for those URLs to the numerous new account homes is impractical given that a lack of time and commitment to server maintenance is the issue.
  • asim 4y ago
    Doing full P2P just isn't there yet. It makes total sense but without talking about some web3 Blockchain, it's hard to get everyone to run a distributed database, identity server, etc without it being some single binary.
    • zeroclip 4y ago
      This is where blockchain ends up shining, since there are economic incentives to running a node.
      • robertlagrant 4y ago
        I wonder if for groups up to a certain size, every client could hold all of the data for the group. I think clients do this anyway for caching purposes, but it would mean that as long as any client still had the data, the room wouldn't vanish. It doesn't scale so well, but if there were an easy ability to (say) plug in an S3 bucket URL for offloading older media, then it might work for quite a while.
    • 5560675260 4y ago
• throwaway-jim 4y ago
  will they be able to migrate their profiles?
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Yes, mostly. Mastodon supports both migrating your profile (followers and block lists, as well as metadata, but NOT content), AND exporting your content (posts, replies, and media uploads). The process is pretty straightforward, and I've done this myself. You will lose your old content's persistent URL references, though federated copies of that content may still be accessible from other instances. See: Moving or leaving accounts: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/> It's also possible to move an entire instance to a new machine: Migrating to a new machine: <https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/>
• majso 4y ago
  Is there a way to host my own micro-instance/identity server instead of always migrating from one public instance to another?
  • arcatech 4y ago
    Yup. Host a single-user instance.
• carlchenet 4y ago
  Enthousiasm is paramount in community work. But managing server infrastructure is more and more complex and it won't go simpler. People should consider joining associations which would be responsible, not individuals. Maybe less servers but larger and better managed ones. Associations are more resilient than individuals.
• pmarreck 4y ago
  why is the maintenance cost of a Mastodon instance so high? What is the technology stack?
  • InitEnabler 4y ago
    Mastodon was created using the Ruby on Rails framework. Your able to quickly write applications at the cost of overhead from all the moving parts and the Ruby language in general (Though in recent years ruby has improved with the introduction of JIT into it's codebase).
    • pmarreck 4y ago
      Ah, that makes sense then. I started out in Ruby years ago; wonderful language, doesn’t scale well. Someone should rewrite it in Phoenix… EDIT: Oh, someone did! https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma https://git.pleroma.social/pleroma/pleroma
  • premysl 4y ago
    From my experience, both Mastodon and Pleroma are massively overcomplicated resource hogs that are hard to set up, configure, or navigate.
    • pmarreck 4y ago
      Pleroma too? Usually Elixir apps are much more efficient than RoR apps in my experience
• OrangeMonkey 4y ago
  I am sad that they are shutting down but we have more options in the Fediverse still. Its the rebirth of the promise of a censorship free internet. A lot of people have decided that its time we shut peoples mouths and stop them from talking 'for the greater good' - this is a pushback against it. One day we will all remember why we should support free speech - god help us on that day.
• andrewallbright 4y ago
  The unnerving thing about this post is just how I could very realistically find myself in similar shoes. I do many things and bet on my ability to learn as I go. Sometimes it does take some extra hours. Time is finite. Why bravery to say "I don't know; I could probably find out but I cannot."
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• cde-v 4y ago
  Is this the company that was always begging for engineers here on HN?
• m-p-3 4y ago
  Props to the instance for doing whatever they can to let people migrate their account somewhere else, and Mastodon has some provision already in place to create an alias and easily move your followers from one instance to another.
• shadowgovt 4y ago
  A major note in the Mastodon fediverse brought down by the fact that it's administered by one person who, despite the fact they are running a social network node, never built up the real world trust connections to find somebody they could share the toil of administration with or tap in when it was time for them to bow out because we are all mortal. The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems.
  • swyx 4y ago
    yeah, idk if you could count this as a success when by his own admission there's so much user data essentially sited on one single point of failure/compromise.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • johnchristopher 4y ago
    > The technological problems are not the hard problems in this space. The hard problems are social problems. This is something that perplexed me when Mastodon and Diaspora and others appeared: why would you want to recreate/mimic the toxicity of FB and Twitter ? The resharing, the upvotes, etc. If social networks all have the seeds of their defaults, why clone it ?
    • wmf 4y ago
      Coming up with "non-toxic" social media is extremely difficult and probably not something programmers can solve.
      • zeroxp 4y ago
        Social media inevitably becomes a reflection of the users, and humans all have a thread of toxicity running through them.
    • proactivesvcs 4y ago
• mattdesl 4y ago
  That's sad to hear, but it makes total sense to shut down the server given its sensitive data, rather than hand it off to another person. Mastodon/ActivityPub is a poor fit for a social network IMHO. - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance. - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator. - People don't want to self-host. The core problem of a lot of social networks comes down to name aliasing, and who controls the name registry. In the case of nostr[1] this is not a problem because everything is using public keys. Another protocol is Farcaster[2] which plans to use a smart contract to maintain a name registry without requiring a single controller. [1] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr [2] https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol
  • i5heu 4y ago
    > - Accounts should not be tied a single server and their continued maintenance. you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work > - Private data and DMs should be end-to-end encrypted rather than entrusted with a single administrator. There is no "private data" on mastodon, I think it gets communicated enough that admins will have access to direct massages. it even says to you "Posts on Mastodon are not end-to-end encrypted. Do not share any sensitive information over Mastodon." if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;) > - People don't want to self-host. True MOST ppl don't want to host, but they are a few that like it and even get money for providing a public service. So I don't have to host smth, I just have to find someone hosting it.
    • olah_1 4y ago
      > you can move your account to another instance in about 2 Minutes of work Maybe 2 minutes for the technical side, then 2 months of getting all your old followers to follow you at your new address. > if you want more, use the IM of your trust ;) Or use a different protocol...
      • Matumio 4y ago
        > getting all your old followers to follow you at your new address No, the old instance will redirect your followers, without interaction. (Though the old instance has to be up to publish the migration.)
• rocky1138 4y ago
  This is almost exactly what happened with me hosting my GNU Social instance, kwat.chat. I enjoyed the community and the feeling that I was helping the fediverse. I let my users know well in advance it was closing down so they had time to move to another instance.
• Pxtl 4y ago
  Fundamentally I've always been uncomfortable with the fact that Fediverse nodes aren't interchangeable in some critical ways - that your identity is tied to a single node, not the aggregate whole. This highlights why. Having nodes control moderation and the like on traffic that originates in and flows through their node makes sense. Having your identity tied to a node has always seemed wrong to me. edit: and to Ash, best wishes in taking care of your family in this difficult time. I imagine that giving up on your admin volunteer role was a very difficult decision but you did the right thing.
• anderspitman 4y ago
  Thanks for your hard work Ash, and sorry to hear about your loved one. As much as I love the Fediverse, I think the culture leans toward instances that are too big. I think the number of people on each instance should be much closer to 1 than 1000. The problem is self-hosting is too difficult for the average person. But that doesn't have to be the case. Self-hosting shouldn't be any more complicated or less secure than installing an app on your phone. You shouldn't need to understand DNS, TLS, NAT, HTTP, TCP, UDP, etc, etc. Domain names shouldn't be any more difficult to buy or use than phone numbers. Apps should be sandboxed in KVM/WHPX/HVP-accelerated virtual machines that run on Windows, Mac, and Linux and are secure-by-default. Tunneling out to the public internet should be a quick OAuth flow that lets you connect a given app to a specific subdomain, with TLS certs automatically obtained from Let's Encrypt and stored locally for end-to-end encryption.
  • rtpg 4y ago
    I think part of it is there are instances that are just sooooo broad. Mastodon.social … shouldn’t exist? I think. It’s too broad and kinda duplicates the general social network issues of everyone using the thing. Meanwhile there are loads of three-digit-user instances that are more focused (and have less problems on a tech level, and on a social level)
    • Kye 4y ago
      I think the project instances exist so people will at least get on board, try it, figure it out, and move on to a more suitable instance rather than abandon the whole thing entirely. The alternative is losing lots of potential users at the front door.
  • wan_ala 4y ago
    Honestly I think some big issues are that not everyone has a fast machine thats going to be up all the time to host the instance. It would be cool to implement something like BitTorrent but for websites.
    • Self-Perfection 4y ago
• seydor 4y ago
  Weakness of running a decentralized service: no money made, which means you have to give and keep on giving. The solution is to decentralize the hosting itself instead of leeching off the work of a few individuals. Mastodon credentials should use something like a bittorrent/blockchain db. It s ok to lose the posts Maintaining oss-related services can be entirely frustrating https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/ https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/
  • i5heu 4y ago
    One could argue that instagram and Facebook where not profitable in for many many years too.
    • seydor 4y ago
      That would be a) false because their creators were having high incomes anyway and b) irrelevant because mastodon will be unprofitable forever
      • i5heu 4y ago
        So you want to say that the Mastodon gGmbH that employees at least 1 developer and runs mastodon.social is not profitable? I would check my notes on that.
• andreyk 4y ago
  As per my comment in reply to monkin, I keep wondering why there isn't an open source website that makes it (almost) as easy to setup a fediverse instance as it is to create a Discord or a subreddit. Surely it's possible for a service to have a nice frontend UI for easy administration by non-technical users, while at the backend dealing with the technical API calls to cloud providers to make it all happen? This sort of website would be incredibly light weight (just API calls, no data storage), and the users would not be tied down to it; as long as they retain ownership of the login credentials to whatever cloud provider they choose, even if this front end shuts down the fediverse instance won't. And if it's open source, it would be easy to migrate to another such 'frontend management' website. I have thought about this quite a bit, and it seems like a great idea - is there something I am missing (aside from it perhaps being nontrivial to set up a Fediverse instance via API calls to cloud providers)? Of course, a clear issue is that there would still be (small) ongoing costs even for tiny instances, so it would not be the same as Discord or reddit in terms of having a 'free tier'. But the pitch of a 'personalized social media website' seems like a pretty cool idea and i'd be willing to pay a bit to try it out.
  • mariusor 4y ago
    It doesn't fully match your requirements, but an easy way to setup a mastodon instance is https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/ Does that help?
• freewizard 4y ago
  Hope things go well for Ash. Gaps/opportunities for Fediverse community: - sustainable mgmt structure and plan for large nodes - features to import content while not breaking existing ecosystem (it's currently possible to move followers and export content only, but not import)
• johnchristopher 4y ago
  > I want to give you as much time as possible to download your data and migrate to a new server. Does it mean you can download your messages and put them back in the global conversation ? How does that work ? Are those messages stored only on one instance ? Do they disappear forever when an instance disappears ? Will users switch to new identity from another instance and import messages or is this lost ?
  • proactivesvcs 4y ago
    You can download and save your social network, filters, block lists, profile and all of your posts. Separately there's a feature to move accounts, which redirect folk to your new account and performs an automatic follow of your network from your new account. Posts are not migrated. If an instance disappears, everything is gone.
    • johnchristopher 4y ago
      Thanks.
• yamrzou 4y ago
  Does anyone have an idea about the infrastructure requirements and the cost of running an instance with the size of mastodon.technology?
  • INTPenis 4y ago
    I run an instance of some ~450 users, ~50 active, on a managed k8s cluster and it's costing me ~200usd/month. So I'm actually moving to my own DC where I get more than twice the resources for less than half the price. If you have DC and power sponsored you can get real far.
    • xani_ 4y ago
      That's ridiculously expensive for that tiny amount of users
      • dbmnt 4y ago
        You could easily host 50 active users on a single VPS for a 10th of that cost. masto.host has a plan that covers 100 active users for $19/mo.
  • dbmnt 4y ago
    The pricing on masto.host should give you some idea of the requirements and cost: https://masto.host/pricing/ https://masto.host/pricing/ I think they're the largest managed hosting provider in this space. Obviously they are charging a premium compared to deploying it all yourself, but I think the prices are fair, and the plans give you a pretty good idea of the resources required. No offense to the other admin, but $200/mo for 50 active users is way too high. A Kubernetes cluster for 50 users is obvious overkill IMO. Maybe you did it that way for the learning aspect, which is fine. You should be able to host 50 active users for a 10th of that cost though. You can easily do it on a single VPS.
• nonbirithm 4y ago
  I had been worried about this with respect to Mastodon for a long time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30447645 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30447645 I think it was only a matter of time before the human resources issue came front and center. My hope is that there can be a good balance between small federated instances kept alive by altruistic volunteer admins and larger instances with enough moderation and funding to handle the number of users that a social network expects but increase centralization. Maybe the conclusion will be that no matter how the technology scales, finding a way for the instances to be kept alive will be a social problem that requires constant attention. The reliability issue also makes me wonder how much of the Fediverse is setting itself up for link rot and the loss of unique content after their maintainers lose passion or move on. And that wouldn't be because of a business decision that is hard to empathize with (in the case of Google+), but simply because a single human body has its limits.
• INTPenis 4y ago
  I'm going to be frank, as a long time federated node admin. In the last few years I've seen so many admins act just like Ash. They have a huge heart and a lot of passion for federation. So they open their doors to thousands of users. And I keep thinking that it's just not sustainable. I've worked in ops for over 20 years, I feel like that background has given me a healthy scepticism and a respect for Murphy's law. So when I launched my Mastodon instance 4 years ago I decided from day 1 that it should be focused on my country, my language, and require new users to request access. Just like the old BBS scene, you have to write a short motivation on why you want an account. This motivation is 100% for vetting out robots. Because let me tell you, I get on average 2 robots a week trying to sign up. Why? I have no idea. But my strategy has brought the number of spam robots on my instance down to 0. I could never imagine being one of those admins who just left their doors wide open. Because I've been online since the 90s, I know how we used to exploit web services back in the day. I was part of that whole 4chan scene, doing online hooliganism. If you're opening your doors to anyone, and hosting their content online on your domain, there is a whole slew of problems coming your way. And the "main" instance mastodon.social got to feel that when an AV vendor blacklisted them. Someone had been using their public profile to host C&C. Of course, why wouldn't they? So now I see a very sad thing, my fellow admins are begging for rent and food money on Mastodon. Because they're spending so much money keeping their instance running. And God only knows how many robot accounts are taking up those resources. I've said this so many times, but I'll keep saying it; keep the instances small and put focus on federation rather than fast growth. We want many, small, well connected instances rather than a few huge monoliths that need corporate money to keep going. I don't care what all the naysayers in this thread are whining about, ActivityPub is amazing. Until someone launches a completely decentralized network that WORKS, AP is the one for me. Scuttlebutt looks interesting though. I'll never get over the magic of looking at my public timeline and seeing posts cascade in from all over the world. A dozen different software platforms, some homemade, some unpublished, some open source projects, they're all talking. Thousands of forums from dozens of countries are all communicating with MY little instance. It's magic.
  • seti0Cha 4y ago
    How hard is it to get connected to other instances? Is this done through personal relationships or prior history or can a complete outsider get involved? I know exactly zero people using Mastodon (that I'm aware of) but this sounds interesting and makes me want to try to set something up.
• andai 4y ago
  Most surprising part of this for me is learning that Mastodon was created because they wanted a version of Twitter with more censorship. https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastodon-server-covenant/ https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2019/05/introducing-the-mastod...
• teawrecks 4y ago
  IMO there's nothing wrong with passing the torch to a new maintainer, this is just part of the design of mastodon. People shouldn't arbitrarily trust an instance maintainer on mastodon any more than they should trust google, twitter, fb, or a tor node with their data. The info they chose to share in plain text with a mastodon instance should be considered compromised. All that matters is the future; where will you send your data going forward? It's part of the design of mastodon that the maintainer can pass the admin role to a new maintainer, and if a user doesn't approve, they can migrate to a new instance. If other instances don't approve, they can blacklist it.
• varispeed 4y ago
  Huge respect. My friend is running a forum (I know madness today) and he is totally sick of it, but has no heart to close it nor trust someone will be able to take over given it is losing money (people - assuming "competition" - were posting adult content and then reporting to Google, so advertising eventually got turned off and other advert providers don't pay enough to keep the lights on).
• braingenious 4y ago
  What an interesting turn of events. As somebody that used to be an admin of a decently large community, here’s some free advice for anybody that’s trying to start something like this: Get mods. Get them early. Get them from the pool of your most enthusiastic users. Fire them when they perform poorly. Continuity plans will be a lot easier to come up with if you’ve been sharing the burden of managing the community for a long time, heck they might even be emergent and obvious after long enough.
• the-printer 4y ago
  The fediverse would benefit from a massive migration to Honk.
• eoinboylan 4y ago
  All the best Ash, thank you!
• amadeuspagel 4y ago
  The fundamental problem here is monetization, and the perfect solution is ads. Apparently this was discussed and rejected because people would instantly move to another server[1]. Not so. Ads on twitter don't bother me much, and ads on a mastodon server would give me some confidence that the server would stick around, and not beg me for money. Monetization with ads would also give people an incentive to market their server. [1]: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8913 https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/8913
  • smoldesu 4y ago
    If you start posting promoted content on a Mastodon server, many instances will immediately defederate with you and/or add you to Fediblock. It's fine if that's something you want to do, and there's nothing in the protocol that stops you from doing so, but everyone else will stop "being your friend" so-to-speak. That's probably why most people wanted to leave.
    • amadeuspagel 4y ago
      I'm talking about showing ads on the website, which is what's discussed in the github issue I linked, not pushing ads to federated instances.
      • smoldesu 4y ago
        Oh, then I guess I don't really see what the problem is. It's a platform that lets you move your account freely, of course people are going to leave if you start smearing shit on the walls.
        • amadeuspagel 4y ago
          As you know, you see ads everywhere outside, and on many websites, including this one. If this genuinely feels like "shit smeared on a wall" to you, you really need to seek help.
• masukomi 4y ago
  a couple people have mentioned it in passing, but i figured this warranted a top-level comment anyone considering setting up an instance and not wanting to worry about having to ssh in during the night and deal with maintence stuff just to talk with friends should 100% consider signing up with masto.host. I've had an instance there for months now. While there's some manual setup on his end (the guy who runs masto.host) from the perspective of someone wanting a new instance it's _very_ easy, and he does a great job of keeping everything up to date. I'm extremely happy to throw money his way each month and _not_ have to worry about maintaining my instance beyond occasionally granting access to new users and proactively blocking remote instances. As a small, invite only, server I don't have to worry about a lot of BS from obnoxious humans. Note: if you use masto.host you don't get ssh access to your server so there are some settings you can't tweak. I'm ok with that in exchange for never having to worry about maintenance.
• fanakhan 4y ago
• jdthedisciple 4y ago
  It is time that monetization in tech becomes and absolute given again. I was not part of this community but I wish all the best to OP and his family. Money solves problems and it shouldn't be considered bad to ask for a little compensation for upholding a service that thousands of people benefit from. That's the basis of anything meant to be sustainable. (I know lichess.org is an exception but tbh nobody knows for how long that's going to work out well.)
• fennecfoxy 4y ago
  Federation seems to be the way to go but current implementations seem a bit lacking from what I've seen. If you have an account with a Mastodon server, what if the owner takes a disliking to you? What if their server shuts down and you can't migrate your account/identity? Realistically every person should be hosting their own personal Mastodon node to at least base their account/identity around it, then consume/interact with content via federation but self-hosting isn't a system that works for "normal" people. Maybe it already works like this (I haven't looked into their code/Mastodon at all recently) but a system where your identity is federated/shared across nodes in the same way torrents are mean that the more communities that you participate in the more "backed up" your identity is; if one node shuts down, your identity is still stored across many other nodes. Hell, it would be possible for people to run identity nodes that deal with nothing other than acting as an identity host/backup for users. I think the PR advantage for things like Twitter is that people can go to one place: "Twitter", it's easy and you can locate all content from there. Mastodon still seems a little fragmented by comparison. We all might be tech people but I think for regular people to adopt there could be a few improvements.
• MastodonTech 4y ago
  While Mastodon.technology may be closing, Mastodon.tech is welcoming new members with the same TOS as found at Mastodon.technology. We are in communication with creator, Ash. We invite you & anyone to register: https://Mastodon.Tech/registration https://Mastodon.Tech/registration We've had over a year's experience running Mastodon but the Ruby platform is not resource efficient nor well suited for this purpose. We installed Pleroma for Mastodon.tech to avoid the inevitable problems Ruby created at Mastodon.technology for Ash. Pleroma is equally connected to the Fediverse. Since 2006 we've hosted a technology forum so this is a natural extension: https://hostboards.com/discussion/5854/hostboards-partners-with-mastodon-tech-to-fulfill-your-tech-passion https://hostboards.com/discussion/5854/hostboards-partners-w...