5 ms·

"The experimental platform with no VC funding whatsoever messed up, I'm going back to the fascist wasteland that is trying to juice me for money by showing me e

by jtode 3y ago

"The experimental platform with no VC funding whatsoever messed up, I'm going back to the fascist wasteland that is trying to juice me for money by showing me enraging content."

walterbell 3y ago
The author did not leave Mastodon, they switched to the largest instance: > Mastodon's biggest problem is that the majority of Mastodon instance administrators are unqualified, and unsuspecting Mastodon users become the victims of shoddy administration ... Despite Mastodon's ambition to be a decentralized network, I can't recommend joining an instance other than the biggest one, mastodon.social.
- salawat 3y ago
  See, people need to remember something. The 4th of the 12 truths of Networking applies to sysadminry. Rfc 1925 (4) Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network. If you want to know why X did Y, you have to sample. You have to become literate, you have to try. Once you do, so much starts to make sense.
- jtode 3y ago
  This fellow wants the same experience from a completely different system, seems to me, which is also the reason that the Twitter people have had so much static from the Mastodon people - it's a different place, with different things going on, and very different assumptions. All of the negative writing I've seen has basically been different versions of "I have expectations as a user, and Mastodon has not met those expectations, so I can't recommend it" with no further examination. No questioning of their own assumptions and expectations, no respect for a culture that has evolved over years by its own bootstraps while they languished in comfy gardens run by evil autocrats, very rarely even a clear explanation of the differences between Mastodon and other networks. Mastodon is not "another social network" that comes from the same place as the others. It comes from hating the others and wanting something different from t them. These writers who come from this "why, Mastodon, should I bestow my precious attention onto your platform rather than these others?" as though Mastodon had something to gain from capturing your attention. It does not; Mastodon rejects the attention economy, so in fact, everyone should be asking themselves what kind of quality content they have to bring. Mastodon does not care about your attention, it only wants to provide you with the tools to find things that your attention craves with no fascism or vile spam or propagandizing by billionaires. Ask not what your social media can do for you - ask what you can do for your social network.
  - lapcat 3y ago
    You seem to have a reading comprehension problem that somehow hasn't been mitigated by the previous reply to you. You're making this about Mastodon vs. other social networks, but that's a false dichotomy. To clarify: 1. I'm not leaving Mastodon. 2. I'm not going back to Twitter. 3. I'm not recommending Twitter. 4. I'm not switching to another social network. 5. I'm not recommending another social network. I even stated in the article that Threads is not a viable alternative to Mastodon. I migrated from one Mastodon instance to another. My complaint was that too many Mastodon instance administrators are incompetent or irresponsible. Moreover, I do expect any service to not experience unexpected data loss. Is that not a reasonable assumption?
    - jtode 3y ago
      That is not an unreasonable assumption, no, for a service. I would posit that your error is in thinking of Mastodon as a service, rather than a community of people trying to get away from using "services" to live our lives through. In that context, I would expect exactly these sorts of errors, and as an admin, I would expect the community to understand and be forgiving, because we are all figuring this out together as we go - again, with only the money in our bank accounts. I think that if you're genuinely interested in participating in the Mastodon project and helping it to succeed, I would suggest that writing a polemic which reflects your service-based expectations and shits on the efforts of the earnest sysops who do this for the passion of it and the desire to see this better alternative happen is about the worst way to express your frustration at losing data that you had the option to do a weekly backup of yourself. You need to let go of your "service" expectations and start thinking of Mastodon as what it is: a network of personal computers which people are using to talk to each other. You need to think of your personal Mastodon profile the same way you think about your personal hard drive.
      - lapcat 3y ago
        > you had the option to do a weekly backup of yourself. I would gladly do this, as I gladly back up the data on my own personal hard drive, but I had no idea I needed to do a weekly backup of my Mastodon data! Nobody warned Mastodon users that this kind of data loss was to be expected. By the time I found out, it was too late. How many of the 1.8 million monthly active Mastodon users are doing weekly backups of their Mastodon data? When has Eugen Rochko or other Mastodon instance administrators ever advised Mastodon users to this? You seem to be blaming the victims here. And again, it's not just me: every user of my old instance experienced the same data loss, whether they know it or not (likely not). There's no "community" if the Mastodon instance administrators are not making crucial announcements to Mastodon users, not helping those users preserve their data. If anything, I have just performed a service to the Mastodon community by informing Mastodon users that their data is not safe on the instances. Instead of properly warning users, they spread reassuringly false bromides like "It doesn't matter which Mastodon instance you join." As it turns out, this matters a lot.

by jtode 3y ago

"The experimental platform with no VC funding whatsoever messed up, I'm going back to the fascist wasteland that is trying to juice me for money by showing me enraging content."

walterbell 3y ago

The author did not leave Mastodon, they switched to the largest instance: > Mastodon's biggest problem is that the majority of Mastodon instance administrators are unqualified, and unsuspecting Mastodon users become the victims of shoddy administration ... Despite Mastodon's ambition to be a decentralized network, I can't recommend joining an instance other than the biggest one, mastodon.social.

salawat 3y ago
See, people need to remember something. The 4th of the 12 truths of Networking applies to sysadminry. Rfc 1925 (4) Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network. If you want to know why X did Y, you have to sample. You have to become literate, you have to try. Once you do, so much starts to make sense.
jtode 3y ago
This fellow wants the same experience from a completely different system, seems to me, which is also the reason that the Twitter people have had so much static from the Mastodon people - it's a different place, with different things going on, and very different assumptions. All of the negative writing I've seen has basically been different versions of "I have expectations as a user, and Mastodon has not met those expectations, so I can't recommend it" with no further examination. No questioning of their own assumptions and expectations, no respect for a culture that has evolved over years by its own bootstraps while they languished in comfy gardens run by evil autocrats, very rarely even a clear explanation of the differences between Mastodon and other networks. Mastodon is not "another social network" that comes from the same place as the others. It comes from hating the others and wanting something different from t them. These writers who come from this "why, Mastodon, should I bestow my precious attention onto your platform rather than these others?" as though Mastodon had something to gain from capturing your attention. It does not; Mastodon rejects the attention economy, so in fact, everyone should be asking themselves what kind of quality content they have to bring. Mastodon does not care about your attention, it only wants to provide you with the tools to find things that your attention craves with no fascism or vile spam or propagandizing by billionaires. Ask not what your social media can do for you - ask what you can do for your social network.
- lapcat 3y ago
  You seem to have a reading comprehension problem that somehow hasn't been mitigated by the previous reply to you. You're making this about Mastodon vs. other social networks, but that's a false dichotomy. To clarify: 1. I'm not leaving Mastodon. 2. I'm not going back to Twitter. 3. I'm not recommending Twitter. 4. I'm not switching to another social network. 5. I'm not recommending another social network. I even stated in the article that Threads is not a viable alternative to Mastodon. I migrated from one Mastodon instance to another. My complaint was that too many Mastodon instance administrators are incompetent or irresponsible. Moreover, I do expect any service to not experience unexpected data loss. Is that not a reasonable assumption?
  - jtode 3y ago
    That is not an unreasonable assumption, no, for a service. I would posit that your error is in thinking of Mastodon as a service, rather than a community of people trying to get away from using "services" to live our lives through. In that context, I would expect exactly these sorts of errors, and as an admin, I would expect the community to understand and be forgiving, because we are all figuring this out together as we go - again, with only the money in our bank accounts. I think that if you're genuinely interested in participating in the Mastodon project and helping it to succeed, I would suggest that writing a polemic which reflects your service-based expectations and shits on the efforts of the earnest sysops who do this for the passion of it and the desire to see this better alternative happen is about the worst way to express your frustration at losing data that you had the option to do a weekly backup of yourself. You need to let go of your "service" expectations and start thinking of Mastodon as what it is: a network of personal computers which people are using to talk to each other. You need to think of your personal Mastodon profile the same way you think about your personal hard drive.
    - lapcat 3y ago
      > you had the option to do a weekly backup of yourself. I would gladly do this, as I gladly back up the data on my own personal hard drive, but I had no idea I needed to do a weekly backup of my Mastodon data! Nobody warned Mastodon users that this kind of data loss was to be expected. By the time I found out, it was too late. How many of the 1.8 million monthly active Mastodon users are doing weekly backups of their Mastodon data? When has Eugen Rochko or other Mastodon instance administrators ever advised Mastodon users to this? You seem to be blaming the victims here. And again, it's not just me: every user of my old instance experienced the same data loss, whether they know it or not (likely not). There's no "community" if the Mastodon instance administrators are not making crucial announcements to Mastodon users, not helping those users preserve their data. If anything, I have just performed a service to the Mastodon community by informing Mastodon users that their data is not safe on the instances. Instead of properly warning users, they spread reassuringly false bromides like "It doesn't matter which Mastodon instance you join." As it turns out, this matters a lot.