What has happened with Mastodon recently feels like a great thing for the fediverse. Many of these platforms are still working out their implementation kinks, but they aren't babies anymore. Just when I thought ActivityPub might never catch on, a significant number of people have decided to give it a chance.
Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!
My takeaway is the opposite. If not even this could make people switch to Mastodon nothing can. Even if Twitter got shut down they would find something else that is not AP.
In my circles I'm seeing mass exodus. It's not just the tinkerers and the anarchists. I'm not surprised about the uptake in the open source community, after all I remember identi.ca being a lovely network for GNOME back in the day.
But I'm also seeing authors, actors, journalists, doctors, and scientists I follow make their way over, as well as a few novelty accounts.
Sure, many of them are dual-posting. But I still see them interacting directly on Mastodon and not just mirroring their Twitter posts on it.
I didn't expect this, but I'm finding it very easy not to use Twitter most of the time. The main exception is friends and family messaging various tweets to each other to share news or laugh about something. So I still have an account, it's still useful, but I'm not scrolling it casually anymore.
I setup a Mastodon account back in May as sort of "just in case Musk messes it up" insurance. And man, did he ever mess it up - worse & faster than my more pessimistic expectations. However, up until about 3 weeks ago there just weren't that many people to follow on mastodon. But that has changed more rapidly than I would have expected. Now I'm following several interesting people I used to follow on twitter.
I'm about 40 and I don't know anyone whose mom or dad is on Twitter. They're all on Facebook still.
Teenagers and even 20-somethings are already a lost cause for Twitter. They're on TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.
And yes, I'm seeing artists, writers, and other non-tech people moving over and finding instances that better suit them.
My friends who consume Twitter as a passive way to be entertained by celebrities aren't moving yet. I'm not sitting here trying to say that Mastodon is a drop-in replacement for Twitter for everybody. But I am surprised and encouraged by how easy it has been for me and many others to find a better experience.
But a lot of people are switching over to Mastodon. In the last 3 weeks or so it went from "welp, there aren't a lot of people to follow over here" to "wow, lots of interesting people I used to follow on twitter are here now!" It's really starting to hit a tipping point as more people make the jump.
The thing is, AP is not just Mastodon. Mastodon is only one software and only one usage. If Mastodon numbers grow, then the AP is more interesting and it is suddenly more interesting for other platforms to consider AP, and for users to use the-equivalent-of-X that is not microblogging. Maybe they'll start to follow people on Pixelfed for instance.
Yep. If Twitter really founders, Meta or Google will roll out something to replace it. Most Twitter users already have accounts with one or both, so it would be a very low-friction switch, and they certainly have the resources to do it. Mastodon will never catch on with the general public, for the same reasons that Linux has not.
I think it’s more likely that a new competitor arises. FB is dying and uncool; Google has no social media chops to speak of. See: Vine getting extinguished EDIT: and only being succeeded by TikTok years later
If having users already there was enough, Google+ would be king of the hill.
I mean to say, that having existing users is not a panacea, since Twitter literally bought Vine with all its users, and then proceeded to squander it. And no one else made the short video format work (<10 minute) for a long while until TikTok gave people a kick in the pants again.
Well this is the problem, USENET, like Activity pub was a PROTOCOL not a platform.
Eternal September lead the the collapse of USENET largely because no company could control it, thus it got harder and harder to manage / control in a way the normies wanted, and governments wanted.
USENET today is primary binary transfers, i.e the high seas of the internet.
It is not largely a communications system anymore.
We are already seeing that as people leaving Twitter, the nice left censored authoritarian bubble and find out that the wider internet is not left censored authoritarian so they are demanding every growing block lists of servers attempting to make a little walled garden for Activity Pub, which undermines the entire purpose of federated/ distributed protocols
"Eternal September" did not lead to the 'collapse' of USENET. It was largely replaced by web-based solutions in more user-friendly domains like AOL. And USENET eventually largely ended up controlled by a few large entities (ISPs) that had the resources to support the huge message volumes. Since there was largely no monetization mechanisms people would support for the needed resources, freely available NNTP servers quickly were dropped by ISPs. Also, it has to be said that the text-only nature of USENET was generally seen as old-fashioned and it was replaced by technologies that could support a better multimedia experience.
Fediverse has all of the same problems inherent in a distributed store and forward system and may suffer the same fate, but lack of centralized control is not the defining problem here.
One major way in which "this time is different" is that the financial cost of the hosting is a tiny fraction of what it once was, and doesn't drive consolidation so strongly towards larger-cap players. It's not quite to the point of "too cheap to meter", but definitely in the realm of where donations can work.
And the underlying software has had the time to work out a lot of the nuances of this design and how to get it to a larger scale successfully. It could still break if the whole planet took up ActivityPub, but it's a hell of a lot closer to the ideal than what happened with the pre-Web protocols.
This reminds me of acoup.blog and his take on subsistence farming as a risk reduction decision. Yes under Roman rule there was more "efficient" farming as some (slave worked) farms began focusing on primary crops for sale.
This meant efficiency of scale plus Ricardos law kicked in and Roman food production increased even without Haber or John Deere.
But most small farmers throughout the ages did not do this - they could have invented the co-op mass farm but the risks were too great - there was not a trade system globally that could guarantee delivery of food stuff X and so it was sensible to not focus your own production on food stuff Y but to grow a little of everything.
I think what we are seeing here is Mastodon etc as the response to the risks of centralised but efficient servers - privacy, ads, government monitoring etc.
That's a gross oversimplification of the premodern economic system. You could only grow food crops next to navigable rivers, they doubled in price for every 20 miles they were transported overland. This meant that the majority of land could only be used for subsistence farming because nothing else could keep the people working the land from starving. Cash crops like frankincense were the only ones that could be grown without easy boat access because they were worth more than their weight in gold.
Well 20 miles from a navigable river looks a lot like most of populated Europe and China...
But I absolutely take the point - anything that can fit in an online comment is a gross simplification- especially for "farming since invention of agriculture".
Also the 20 mile is not a hard limit - it's easy to envisage some kind of system where I grow my cash crops near transport like river or coast, and sell them on a trade network, and you grow different crops further out and bring them not to the river / coast but to me to feed me. That probably will be more efficient but just look at the network of trust and possible disasters required - only very stable politics would allow anything like that - and that stability was rare. China probably had more of that for more of the past 2000 years than anywhere else - and that may be the cause of the invention of the bureaucrat!
Navigable for a barge and navigable for a canoe are two very different things.
The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently. They also had the Nile which isn't _in_ Egypt, but _is_ Egypt.
> The Danube and the Rhine were the two major rivers that could be navigated by Romans and they were the borders of the empire for that reason: they were the only way to supply border garrisons efficiently
I don’t see why the southern shore of the river would be easier to keep supplied from those rivers than the northern one. So, if the empire ended there because of supply issues, wouldn’t it end a short distance north of the river?
Also, wouldn’t those rivers only help supply from other border areas, not from the much larger inner parts of the empire?
I would think those rivers just are natural boundaries because they provide some protection against invading enemies.
>I don’t see why the southern shore of the river would be easier to keep supplied from those rivers than the northern one. So, if the empire ended there because of supply issues, wouldn’t it end a short distance north of the river?
Brett says that moving grain by road would double the cost for every 100 miles. He has quite a few articles on premodern farming, and may have given a different figure in other articles.
Roman roads were high tech for the era and those were still pretty bumpy. A modern road is much more efficient. Bouncing over uneven terrain not only damages the products and veg it also causes wear and tear on the cart, the animals, and the driver.
Also doubling isn’t a bad thing for the first couple of multiples. Each doubling increases the supply by a factor of four on open terrain. It’s no accident that big cities are at the confluence of trade routes. Up in the mountains creates a funnel that raises the average cost and lowers the reliability of everything too much. It’s like you’ve blockaded yourself.
Travelling by horse and cart can't be much faster than 30 miles per day. So even if you're only 30 miles away, you have a day to get there, a day at the market, and a day to get back. That's 3 days you're not working on the farm. You and the horse that pulls the cart, which of course also needs feeding, and whose day-job is ploughing.
These kinds of insights for old-school roleplaying (OSR) games. Hard to farm out of books, but very insightful having stumbled upon it. And it's not just needing to be true in an absolute, historical sense, but a useful mechanic to save for later.
A course that goes over how everything we think is bad today is good in a world stuck in the Malthusian trap. Working harder today to have a better life tomorrow just means your children working harder tomorrow to have the same life you have today.
The option he didn't talk about at all was how in such a world sexism could keep average living standards quite high so long as all women of reproductive age were kept in near starvation so they could barely carry children to term. But there's only so much unthinkableness you can expect from someone living in the current day lecturing at a university.
Thank-you. I see it is part of Professor Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. And that is part of a series of 49 books, The Princeton Economic History of the Western World.
My (limited) understanding of the book is that basically during the 19C in Britain, poor uneducated (and unproductive) people died off leaving space for the middle class to grow. Which leads to the conclusion that killing the ooor leads to economic growth. As a thesis it may be short of ... something.
I may have misunderstood the tweet of the review of the article based on the book.
Anyway, my general conclusion is that however hard it is to understand history, understanding economic history is twice as opaque
Rather the opposite actually. During the 19th century for reasons that have nothing to do with demography the British learned how to use the poor who would have died to do productive work instead. Then for reasons that have everything to do with child mortality people stopped having 7 children per woman _before_ contraception became widely available. This is the reason why France is smaller than Germany today. Their child mortality decreased faster than Germany's.
Yeah your approach is the more usual commonly accepted idea - poor people stopped dying moved to cities got educated became a productive middle class.
The above quoted book tried to argue that the poor dying continued and the middle classes of victorian briton had more kids and hence took over - a sort of poorly argued eugenics wrapped in the usual "it's culture innit" argument.
However Like I say I have only read enough of the book to decide it's in my reading list only after I discover immortality.
It's not an argument it's a fact that the rich had more surviving children than the poor. Repeat for 5 generations and you have completely replaced the original population with the offspring of the top 10%. That's a century. The middle ages lasted 8 centuries.
That a simple mathematical fact like that is considered eugenics is reality denial on par with the flat earth society.
The 19th century was special because people figured out how to use coal to do the work done by muscle in the middle ages. The previous centuries had seen a continued decline in capital costs. E.g. mediaeval interest rates were routinely 15% and more for secured loans.
Here is a UI issue that could be a deal-breaker for many would be Mastodon users: broken search.
When I type a hashtag into the search box of any given instance, I get useless search results.
For instance if I search for #lisp on fosstodon, I get some hash tags that begin with #lisp, not #lisp itself. They all have very low activity, from several years ago.
If I do the same on another instance like mstdn.ca, I get nothing.
BUT: if I use the URL <domain>/tags/lisp, bam: recent stuff appears! On either instance.
The same if I see the hash tag in a post and click on it.
Users are going to join Mastodon and try to use the search box to find content related to their interests, and falsely conclude that there is nothing, or next to nothing. That is going to cause some nonzero user attrition.
It's not just a problem for tags like #lisp, but mainstream things like #kids, #parenting, #dogs, what have you.
My home instance comes up with nothing for any of these searches, with or without hash. Not quite; for "dogs" it finds a user named "Elon Musk F___s Dogs" as its only search result.
Mastodon search is intentionally broken as some sort of abuse deterrent. Like you can't search for Fetterman and then reply to every post with an angry rant. Of course, also makes it impossible to find good content. This is somehow considered a feature.
It’s a feature in the same way desktop Linux’s reliance on commands and confusing user interface is a feature. It stops anyone but a group of cliquey antisocial coders who developed it from using it, and make sure it’s exactly perfect for their needs. They are then shocked when corporate alternatives that actually try to serve a general userbase (as well as having much more resources) take over everything.
It’s practically the history of open-source, unfortunately. Mozilla was able to resist that for a while but is unfortunately falling into the same trap
for me as a server admin I hate how incredibly annoying it is to set up a new instance. Even the docker setup is very poorly explained (as in not at all in the official documentation) and there are so many subsystems needed for the setup. There are many third party setup guides but most are so outdated that they don't work anymore
It's not self contained and after running an instance for a while you can be in update hell because the containers might need newer versions and you need to read up on every service and how to update that.
I much more appreciate the gitea approach. Simple setup, self contained but can be extended with external databases if needed
I have a situation at work where someone keeps reporting CVEs to me and I don’t think they get that our docker base image gets automatically rebuilt every so many days and picks up all the fixed from Alpine. If we do nothing that window will close itself in a few days. So do you think we need to drop everything and work on this or just wait?
Sounds like Mastodon is missing some engineering discipline and maybe this is a good time for some to show up. Fixing some of this stuff before Twitter gets even worse would be a good thing.
On the contrary I found it quite easy to set up a dockerized Mastodon system using prebuilt containers.
It took me half a day of tinkering from not knowing anything about it to compose a system that was integrated into the rest of my infra that I was comfortable to invite my friends to.
What I am now completely oblivious to is KPIs to judge the health of the components.
I really need to remind you folks that you are transferring your trust to these local server administrators. They might mishandle your data. They might be even less prepared to deal with moderation than big social media. They might end up having to close their services due to lack of time or money.
It’s all fun but please keep this in mind. Perhaps host your own instance?
So, like when using most websites? If you use Hacker News you're trusting Dang and the other folks running this place. If you use Facebook or Twitter, you're trusting Zuck, Elon and the folks working at Meta or Twitter. If you use independently run forums and community sites, you're trusting the people running those places.
Self hosting your own instance is great when possible (and I definitely think it should be possible for almost all services, at least in an ideal world), but you won't be able to do much in life without trusting at least someone along the way.
Let’s say you are a journalist or wathever today profession that depends on reaching people. After the twitter fallout you went to this new journalist centric instance and managed to recover a good following. Months later and you had a bad intercalating with the server admin which ended up not being a level headed person as you previously thought. He deletes your account… not even a chance to use the migration tools to redirect profile.
Some of these hypotheticals are a becoming a little ridiculous. There's very little recourse if twitter bans you, or youtube bans you and you're not capable of raising a stink on HN, or what not. It's hardly any different when you're using a mastodon instance.
I'm pretty sure they'll ban you if it's 'inconvenient' not to, like if a company raises potential legal hell, your posts get mass reported, you end up in the midst of a huge internet controversy/witchhunt, etc.
A large company is no more immune to that than a small one, or a community run site would be.
And at least with an individual or small company/group, you have someone to put your case to in that situation. Someone who can probably offer support and potentially lift the ban rather than the 'Get fucked' attitude of Facebook, Google, etc.
I assure you, individuals,
especially ones with the tiniest bit of power, as just as capable of telling you to "get fucked". Some of them work at Twitter or Facebook. Others run your HOA or are university professors. Or Mastodon servers.
The server admin can kick you off just because they feel like it. At least with a large public platform there's the possibility of public exposure of bad behavior.
Did twitter TOS was ever ok with impersonating accounts?
I don’t want to be in a position where I’m defending twitter but need to remind federated instances are run mostly by normal people. Having the cake and eating it and all that.
I think it's not difficult to find instances ran by ethical people or ethical organizations on the fediverse. Throwing the baby with the bath water because you theoretically can stumble upon bad admins, is in the realm of a "ridiculous hypothetical" to me.
I’m pretty sure I’ve made it clear that I’m glad people are enjoying Mastodon but I take issue when everyone seems to be omitting the tradeoffs. To make things worse im being seen as some kind of concern troll for pointing it out.
People moving to Mastodon fall into two groups, by and large - people who like it for normative reasons, and people moving there to see what the buzz is about. The first group sees practical concerns as an obstacle to be defeated; they would say you ought to move to Mastodon regardless of technical problems or lack of utility. The second isn't defending it in offsite discussion board.
In terms of utility for social networking, there's no defending Mastodon relative to a Facebook or Twitter. The small userbase is reason enough not to switch; what use is a social networking site if the people you want to interact with aren't on it?
That there are so few if any people who both recommend Mastodon and don't have moral/political objections to Twitter is damning. Where are the objectors who recommend it on purely descriptive grounds? It's a bit like GNU - it's cool, but don't try to tell people it's a viable replacement for Windows.
How would you find them? There's no website describing fediverse admins and their reputations. Most of the time you don't even know who the admin is. It could be anyone.
This isn't different than other websites. It's true of web forums too. It's fine, just don't post anything you can't afford to lose.
Experience: on my third Mastodon account. The first one disappeared without notice.
i think in many cases users are closer--node wise and influence wise--to their server admins than they were to twitter's moderation team. always? of course not. but, if this is a major concern for you, then its easy to either start your own server with a group of people or even spin up on your own. this was not possible under twitter.
It's a common thing in the Fediverse that controversial moderation actions are discussed criticaly. People who don't like it then move onto another server. That's a feature.
If I host a personal instance, it's good that I can ban anyone I want. If you host a public instance, you probably will try to enforce your rules somewhat consistently, else it's gonna be hard to earn the trust of your users.
Because big data is valuable and little data is generally not, admins of small instances have little incentive to dig into the DB.
Because humans are moderating the small instances, they can do a better job than AI moderators, albeit with more work.
Moving from one Mastodon instance to another taking follows and followers is quite easy. Admins usually announce plans to close with enough time for people to make the move.
No, but OP was arguing that lack of trust was reason not to use Mastodon. But if both Twitter and Mastodon both have the same trust issues then their argument is moot.
well, at least twitter is a well established, extremely visible corp. for a mastodon instance the list of questions is long and start with: who’s your hosting provider.
Whoever is in the pilot seat and that’s beautiful. Although if things start to get a bit too edgy we might see entire servers blacklisted from store apps. Also server-wide block done by administrators. If I’m not mistaken the largest mastodon instance is Pawoo.net and that’s basically a japanese board for posting controversial hentai artwork. Pawoo.net is blacklisted from most popular Mastodon servers.
Gab comes to mind, before they forked the code to become their own thing. The Tusky case was notable because the app rickrolled users trying to log in to Gab.
Pretty sure it happened to Gab nodes. In this case justified (and probably with a bit of push from Apple and Google) but the precedent exists.
Slightly related Google blocked Element a few years ago because something posted on a federated instance. I think they strong handed matrix.org to implement moderation on the default servers.
That sounds great for verification. It would be great if users could automatically follow that pubkey across other nodes in case the pubkey owner decides or is forced to migrate.
Totally, but I have even less trust in Twitter now. Everyone who could say "no, that is unethical" has been fired or left the company. The company is deep in debt, desperate for revenue, and Musk's largest investor is a prince from a country that beheads its enemies. Assume all your Twitter data has already been sold with absolutely no limits.
Does Mastodon need to spend more time per post on moderation than a service like Twitter? As I understand it, people generally report bad posts to the moderator of the instance they came from and expect them to take them down. And if the instance is unresponsive to takedown requests, it gets added to a blacklist that is shared widely across instances (via #fediblock etc). So the end result is you generally have one person either taking down a post or issuing a network-wide ban, just like on Twitter.
This is something I'm also struggling with. Feels like self host is the only way to go otherwise your server admins decide whatever you can see or not.
That's why I think if you don't self host the first server choice ("choose whatever you want it doens't matter") is extremely downplayed. Instances can block each other and if you end up on a "wrong one" (the peer pressure to avoid guilt by association is really really strong if you look around) then you have to move around, your name changes etc.
Although i think that's what most people want. One of the reasons centralization won out for email is dealing with spam can be absolutely exhausting, so gmail started to look really attractive for the average user.
Yeah but in case of e-mail all it takes for you to "own" your identity is to own your domain at few bucks a year. Bit more work with setting up mastodon instance and dealing with all that mess.
I do wonder how mastodon would handle influx of spammers. There is zero barrier to entry, and banning servers is ineffective if it is just an account doing the spamming.
A big deal was that a good Gmail client was available early on Android, and that you would basically get a gmail address set up for you ? (I wonder if Google didn't allow, feature-wise, for other email clients to work as well on Android ? I know that instant messengers have issues like that...)
How exactly is it hard to enter the fediverse ? Yes, you need to spend time to understand what you're going into, to understand the lingo, the rules, the etiquette. But it's normal, because Mastodon is not Twitter2, the fediverse is not the usual social networks. It's a new world, you have to understand why it's different.
If Google ever speaks AP I won't be surprised to see it defederated from many instances. It will create a schism, and that's perfectly ok because the expectations are different.
Well, I found it straightforward, so you'd have to ask the many people who are saying they found it difficult. The most common issue I've noticed is "how do I pick a server". For that reason, I think 'big name' servers may be necessary for widespread adoption.
But do we want widespread adoption ? It'd be nice if people used federated/decentralized means of communication, but the objective is not to reproduce the schema of domination and control by a few people in the majority; taking control back is the basis of building the Fediverse. As long as people don't go through the process of understanding the structures of power, we won't have made any progress.
Well, just as I want as many people as possible to have email addresses that I can use to send messages to them, it would be useful for me for as many people as possible to have the equivalent for more public communication. I think that's a separate issue from power structures.
People always complain that MS does the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish model but they never remember or refuse to acknowledge that a lot of these other big tech companies have and continue to do that the same thing
XMPP is but one of many protocols that were adopted by Big Tech, then once market share was achieved they took their users and walked away from the open internet
You need a secondary link to your friends (email, phone, other server) so you can notify them when one of your vertices is taken down or another is added.
I don't understand the network-wide ban? That makes Mastodon inherently centralised. Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse? Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow. It's like saying some person has the final say which RSS feeds all RSS feed readers should ban from the RSS-verse.
Also very new to this still, but from what I got so far, #fediblock is first and foremost just a hashtag. It's "well known" and there is a convention behind it, but it doesn't have any specific technical effects - i.e., you can't just remote control another server's blocklist by tooting #fediblock.
If your server's admin(?) makes a fediblock toot, that's more an statement that your own server has blocked someone and asks other servers to do the same. Admins of the other servers can always decide how to deal with that signal - ignore, issue the same block, boost the signal, etc. (Though there is probably some "peer-pressure"/reputation management at work, which makes their decisions not completely free)
So the "network-wide ban" really isn't. It's more a ban from the vast majority of the network - but there is no technical way to issue a genuine ban from all Mastodon instances, the way you can e.g. get banned from the entirety of Reddit.
That at least seems more democratic to me. Of course the usual pitfalls of democratic systems still apply: How to deal with bad-faith #fediblock signals? How to avoid hidden centralisation where certain instances gain more authority to issue blocks than others? etc...
If someone more experienced has some articles with more details about how the system works, that would be really cool.
I'd imagine the peer-pressure to be very large. In the world of private torrent trackers, you have a similar setup. Each tracker is independent in general, but there is the cabal, a group of elite trackers that dominate their vertical in pretty much all metrics, and are connected via staff knowing each other. You misbehave on one cabal-tracker bad enough, you're gone from all of them.
Lower tier trackers will often adapt the cabal's decisions for various reasons. You end up with a situation where one staff member making a decision can end your membership on a dozen sites.
In the torrent world, it's pretty open. I expect the same to be the case on the fediverse, even if it's not publicly communicated. I'm sure server admins do communicate with each other in non-public forms.
> Why does a network-ban even need to exist? There is no algorithm that presents your feed with posts from other servers. You only see who you follow.
Mastodon servers do often have a "federated timeline" that shows you all the posts from servers your instance knows about. People can also send you unsolicited messages by replying to you or @-mentioning you.
> Who is the person who has the final say which server may be part of the fediverse?
I don't think there's really a single person with the authority to ban someone from the whole fediverse; your instance admins always have the final say about whether their instance talks to another instance. But things like shared blocklists mean that, in the vast majority of unambiguous spam or illegal content cases, only one person actually has to respond to them directly.
You can't block everyone bad because you don't know who they are until after they spam you. Last month I got 100 spam texts from the same sender ([Redacted] Political Party) using a different phone number for each.
There is no network-wide ban; each server manages its own list of banned remote servers.
There are lists of servers with bad reputations that get passed around and form the beginnings of many servers’ blocklists, but there’s no central entity maintaining a single list that says which servers are or aren’t part of the fediverse.
It quickly becomes "that moderator decided he doesn't like their worldviews and put it on banlist now 100s of servers subscribe to".
That kind of list needs pretty good moderation to avoid that. Also, it's not really that effective considering offenders can easily move servers.
Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech
> Hell, it would be all to easy for adversarial group to just server hop and get a bunch of sites blocked purely because the mods of those sites are not on 24/7... or just allow for free speech
Nah. De-federating is manual. Such an adversarial group would need to join up, start spamming, and keep on spamming long enough for their instance to be added to a blacklist, and for other admins to pull that blacklist in, without the admin ever acting in the meantime.
It's not like the fediverse is that big, either - people talk to each other.
There is no mechanism currently to subscribe to a blocklist. Some forks allow exporting/importing block lists as CSVs, but that is manual.
Am new admin for a friend-only instance; currently blocking seems to be done via user reports + checking in on the #Fediblock hashtag. It's all manual, and repeated admin work needs to be done per-instance, which is why the article says it's inefficient but a good trade-off (so you can choose the server you align with best).
I don’t really understand what point you’re trying to make. The way moderation is handled in your example sure sounds a lot more democratic, or at the very least with some fundamentals allowing it to be democratic, than twitter ever will be.
I was responding to the "human inefficiencies" section of the article, which claims that Mastodon is inherently much more inefficient than Twitter because many different moderators (from different instances) must act on the same post. I don't think that's true in practice.
unless there is an election about who gets added to the list it s not even democratic. And the freedom of speech is generally protected, not subject to the whims of democracy
If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance. You are not electing who goes on the list, but you are electing to follow certain lists implicitly by which instance you join.
With mastodon/fediverse, you have a choice of numerous different 'twitters', rather than being stuck with the global twitter decision.
>If it's an instance level ban, then you can vote with your feet by migrating to a new instance.
That's the part that interests me the most.
Which is why I (when I get around to it) will self-host my own ActivityPub instance (Mastodon? Pleroma? WriteFreely?).
That way, I decide what gets blocked and what doesn't. And since it's federated (assuming other sites will federate with me), I can still access the benefits of using fediverse resources, without being beholden to someone else to make such decisions for me.
From a longer-term perspective, ISTM that an ActiviyPub (AP) "user agent server" (UAS) which allowed individual users to federate with the resources of their choosing without having to "join" an extant instance, makes a lot of sense.
Rather the UAS would utilize your local (i.e., generated and managed/federated from your AP UAS instance) fediverse credentials and act as a proxy for you, communicating with the instances containing the resources you're interacting with and acting as storage/cache/server for the user's client apps.
This would make the fediverse even more decentralized and under user control. However, it would also make discoverability even harder.
Perhaps that's ActivityPub's killer app? A discovery app. Perhaps a protocol change to require a cryptographically signed summary/intro for each instance, along with with a searchable index?
It works a bit like "cell-phone number portability" in the US. You set your original account to point at your new account, and you tell your new account about your old account. All of your followers migrate to your new account automatically.
Of course, you could still get burnt if your host just disappears one day, because it can't point to your new account. So there's an incentive to use a well-run server with a good track record and a reasonable funding model, I guess.
In order for that migration to happen, the original server needs to cooperate and publish a "this person moved their account" message of some kind, right? I wonder if instance admins ever prevent that from happening if they don't like the server you're moving to.
I guess the problem is your username, right? Someone with a distinctive username that is, essentially, their identity has an incentive to squat on that username on multiple instances.
"Democratic" means "people rule" not "majority vote".
By giving you the choice of which server to use, you choose your moderation. If other people choose (or choose to delegate the choice) to block you, that's still democracy.
there's no globally enforced blacklist. servers decide their own peering policy. cringe servers wall themselves off with much zeal, while based servers don't even care about cringe servers' existence. it's great
As someone completely unfamiliar with this stuff, that sounds like centralized witch hunting/cancelling to me. If that works as you describe, it sounds like mastodon/fediverse thing is headed rapidly toward all the problems that are widespread elsewhere right now.
Way back in the mists of ancient times, about 1970, a myth arose in
minds of primitive men and women;
The new Internet was like a telephone and could connect anybody to
anybody.
This 'peer-to-peer' idea was good thing. It felt exciting and
democratic. It remains a fantastic leap for humanity, worth defending
to the death.
However, for some - a possibility once becomes a necessity unto the
limit - that is to say the idea that;
"occasionally anyone could talk to anyone"
silently transformed into the idea that
"everyone should talk to everyone all the time"
whereas in fact
"most people don't want to talk to most people most of the time".
That is a problem at the intersection of people, technology and
culture. As the earliest culture-shock pundits predicted, we still
haven't really worked out what we want to use this technology for.
It would be best not to optimise too early, to leave our options open
and not let any one model dominate development - which is the theme of
resilience through diversity in the OP.
I'm convinced decentralization is viable for local applications and services like offline document editors and Syncthing, somewhat so for geographically dispersed but closed systems like 1:1 DMs and group chats/video calls (Tailscale sharing might work for static sets of people like friend groups and polycules), but I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where you expect anyone on any server to be able to reply to people on another server.
I'm almost sure they are not. Moderator of some server deciding that their users do not deserve to communicate with someone from some other server is just terrible model from every perspective. It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter.
Yet of course that doesn't scale well to bigger social discussions, it's way too easy for malicious agents to destroy any chance for sensible wider discussion when there is no moderation present. HN/Reddit-esque "just let people downvote and push the downvoted stuff down" works somewhat in most cases, up until some group decides to vote brigade the conversation, and in wider discussion there is also the problem of "I downvote not because the comment is bad but because it disagrees with me.
> It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with. I want to decide to ban user, or ban topic/tag, or even ban server, not have decision deferred to whoever is running the server, that's no better than twatter."
You can pay someone to host a server for you, starting at $4/month. (Well, MastoHost is a little behind on signups this week, but they'll catch up.) If you do this, then you'll have total control over your moderation policy.
My instance is run by someone who mostly only blocks the absolute worst, including instances that are illegal under European law. I'm fine with those blocks! Other instances are focused on serving people who are regularly harassed, and those instances ban aggressively. There's even a "co-op" instance where users vote on policy.
I think it's worth remembering that for many users, a pleasant experience without harassment is a valuable service. I've moderated niche communities for years, and it has become obvious that if you let a handful of jerks abuse everyone else, then dozens of amazing community members will quit.
>If you do this, then you'll have total control over your moderation policy.
My impression was that many apply transitive banning? So that if I peer with a “bad” server A then good server B will block me even though my personal posts may be fine.
Suppose that everyone who participated ran their own server, population 1.
Then choosing to block other servers would be equivalent to blocking other people, which we agree is a good thing.
Now someone comes up with an adblock list: subscribe to it, and these servers will not bother you. It's probably not perfect, but it improves your experience a lot. If you don't like it, switch to another, or don't subscribe to any.
And now we are back where we started: you can choose to either subscribe to a policy (join an existing server) or be independent.
Normally, yes. Different kinds of blocks are listed at the bottom of an instance's "About" page. Often there's a note for each blocked instance, too, though some admins leave that blank.
I've seen a couple of servers which only show the block list to users with accounts. These tend to be restricted-membership servers, ones which don't publish their member directory or local feed, either.
SMTP being created 40 years ago is probably why it still works today. Just like the telephone network, it has a historical exception from the moral obligation to prevent Bad People from using the network to say harmful or incorrect things. (Section 230 didn't exist back then, so it wasn't clear that that kind of moderation was even legal without taking full responsibility for everything users say.)
Mastodon doesn't have this kind of exception, so it suffers from a lot of conflict about who exactly the Bad People are and whether accepting messages from them causes you to become a Bad Person yourself.
Anti-spam measures exist in SMTP, but the broader moral imperative does not.
I can disable my spam filter, and no one will know or care except for me (if I get a lot of spam). On the other hand, it is generally considered immoral to allow people to disable anti-Bad Person filters, because then two Bad People could use the network to communicate. That creates a lot of potential for drama, large public arguments, and network fracturing that isn't present in legacy systems.
People who use the service to plan murders?
People who disagree with your politics?
People who (accurately) quote a book written 200 years ago that uses a word you don't like?
People whose skin color you don't like?
Even the "ban what is illegal by law", aside from some common stuff, varies from country to country. Anything above that is pretty much politics.
Like, it's fair to say "okay, this community is to discuss X, we don't do politics coz that's always divisive", but the moment mods try to play moral guide and decide what's wrong think and what isn't any bias they have will be magnified by the power they have.
I don't see anything wrong with the people who manage and pay for the server - usually for themselves and their friends, or because they are passionate about decentralization, and hardly ever because they set out to provide a platform for everyone to be able to say everything to anyone else - to be able to decide who their server will interact with.
In the fediverse, after all, users who don't like that decision can always move to another instance, or set up their own - you can't do that on twitter, HN, Reddit, and the barrier to entry for setting up one's e-mail server is high enough that the capability to do that is only theoretical.
> It should be always up to user to decide who they want to communicate with
But it is, because the accounts are portable, so they can just move to another instance... it's an actually free market. In the end, you can always self-host if you literally can't agree with a single admin out there.
> I'm not sure the moderation and inter-server conflicts are workable for publicly visible posts where you expect anyone on any server to be able to reply to people on another server
I don't think that's a desirable goal. It's up to individual services to host centralized forums and deal with the ensuing moderation issues.
I agree, the fediverse seems to be one of the places the "old internet" moved to.
But personally I haven't found the waves of Twitter users running from Musk to be part of that. For the most part they seem to be running into the fediverse and expecting the same culture that Twitter had.
As these sorts of waves tend to always go, I expect it to either fizzle out or to ruin the culture that everyone prior to them got to enjoy. Although maybe the fediverse will be a bit more resilient to this due to being less centralized.
Whenever you hear the words "efficient" or "inefficient" you should always have in the fore of your mind the question "For what goal?" or in other words "By what metric?"
A lot can hide in the unspoken assumptions behind the unqualified use of the idea of efficiency.
In this case the comparison of "efficiency" of Twitter vs. Mastodon is pretty meaningless. There are as many goals as there are users and moderators and (in Twitter's case) management and investors, eh? Of course, there are broad groupings and shared interests, but by and large the folks using Twitter and/or Mastodon have different goals.
It reminds me of comparisons between industrial farming and small-scale ecological farming: industrial farming is more efficient at creating massive amounts of some kinds of products, but it literally cannot produce any of some other kinds of products. (E.g. you can't get Alpine strawberries in the supermarket because they start to lose structural integrity the very moment you pick them. The only way to get them is to grow them close to your kitchen.)
- - - -
As a bit of a tangent, I like to reflect how evolution has no goals therefore speaking of the efficiency of living systems is meaningless. Evolution is a chemical tautology.
I've seen more and more advertisements for Mastadon on HN, probably because of the whole Twitter debacle. Does anyone use the service? I mean, enough people so that the average person would know what it is? From my experience with Mastadon it took me a while to even learn how the service was used, and all I remember was thinking "wow that's too complicated to use or get Joe Average User to sign up for". Without ease of use a critical mass of users won't be possible so it won't ever be anything other than a niche product.
Signing up and using it is no more complicated than Twitter once you choose an instance. The Gradient (which I am part of) set up a new Mastodon instance (sigmoid.social) last week for the AI community which now has 3.5k active users - it took off rather quickly. My hope is that Mastodon becomes like a cross between Discord and Twitter; specific communities such as AI people set up an instance for themselves via a simple hosting service (eg we used MastoHost which made it almost as easy as starting a Slack or Discord) which makes signing up super easy.
I don't think it a large proportion; the vast majority of users are on a few large instances such as Mastodon.social which are not via MastoHost. The owner also stated he would not want to host more than a 4th of all instances
Yeah, people are using it. Infosec.exchange and fosstodon.org are pretty busy now. I’m on a smaller instance (but still like 10K users) called ioc.exchange and that’s pretty good too (obviously they all link to each other, but I’ve found it is good to be on a server with a fairly interesting ‘local’ feed to have a look through when not much is happening with the people you follow).
I’m in Australia and a lot of people have moved from Twitter to a server called aus.social, so if I was going to tell friends or relatives to get on Mastodon I wouldn’t probably direct them to sign up to that specific Mastodon server, not just say “you should use Mastodon” and then expect them to work it out. That one has a lot more rules than the infosec ones though.
The concept of federation is definitely complicated for most people. Even I dont completely understand the intricacies despite running a mastodon instance myself (link in profile).
However, you can have large general purpose instances which do not have to depend on federation to deliver the value of a network like twitter. Additionally, mastodon itself has grown by leaps and bounds in making the UX easier for the average user familiar to twitter/facebook.
I think its only a question of time before you have large general purpose mastodon instances where users dont have to grapple with federation and the UX becomes familiar for the layman. But at the same time there is space for smaller community focussed instances if someone wants to take their tribe with them.
I think the answer a few weeks ago was ‘no’, but that’s changing. At this point most of the people I followed on Twitter have migrated. Now, I followed mostly tech people, lawyers, and cat and bird photo twitters; someone who uses twitter to follow celebrities may have a different experience. (I do also get the impression that Irish twitter moved maybe quicker that most twitter quasi-communities)
If not a false memory, I have read it for a short while and from what I’ve seen (please excuse my opinion) it is a in a pretty good way a specific community(-es) which is probably not ready for this massive exodus. People of global communities barely understand the concept of lurking and local culture. Even with the obstacles you mentioned there is a chance for Mastodon’s own Eternal September happening.
Quoting someone sad
Warum retweeten alle aus Twitter? Das ist, als ob man sich von einer toxischen Freundin trennt und dann nur noch von ihr erzählt
Author here. I did not go into this, but it really is a problem that I, and most of my fellow hobby beekeepers undercharge. That we don't count our hours into the price means that the few Beekeepers who do it professionally, have a hard time charging proper prices.
So I'm happy to hear Swiss prices are better. Though, having lived and worked there a summer, I guess it's still relatively cheap. The price of a coffee....
I can imagine it being both more efficient and just better in various measures as well.
For starters just the ads and trackers must have a cost, which is paid on every visit.
As we've seen many times on the internet, cacheable content can be far more efficient than constantly updated content that needs refetched just to show you an ad impression. Google's web page speed tools will warn you about Google Ads non-cachable JS tracker.
Combine that with the incentive to show growth in 'user' metrics, which encourages both leniency on bots and intentionally addictive designs for non-bots and I can see an obvious case for twitter being less efficient.
> Spritely is an effort to fix the problems that remain with ActivityPub.
If that's true, then your single sentence does more to communicate what Spritely wants to do than that entire website. Even searching for occurrences of "ActivityPub" on the site with Google¹ returns mostly 404s. It sure does not appear to be a living concern.
Everyone who knows that a technology where decentralization is one of the requirements will know this, and they will also know that this is a required tradeoff when it comes to decentralization - no free lunch.
A lot of people skewer blockchain-based tech for ineffeciency, but not a lot of those people realize it's supposed to be like that.
I'm glad that people are at least starting to realize that a lot of decentralized tech has the prerequisite of forfeiting efficiency.
And not just tech. In the article I tried to compare it to gardening.
But my initial idea was to compare it two political issues recently in my country. That story was far too unrecognizable though.
The issues are, where a decentralized police, that was governed by local mayors, was replaced by a central police force, governed by national government. Centralization that was sold as being much cheaper and more efficient. The cheaper was a lie, but only because the conversion itself turned out far more difficult. The more efficient is true. But only for a certain part of efficient.
Previously, e.g. mayors could micro target issues that were directly plagueing a small neighborhood. Now, this is still possible, but has to move through layers of bureaucracy first. In many parts, i'm told, it's less efficient. Overall, the sum, however obviously operates more efficient. Instead of each of the thousands of municipalities having some HR, there now is only one. Same for IT, etc etc.
The other issue is exactly reversed: mental service for Youth (youth care) a rather large institute, was decentralized: moved to municipalities. The promise was that this would allow far better detailed care. It is a fiasco, because the national government never considered that it would be far more expensive. They even promised it would cut costs.
Why voters fall for this, and think that both promise can be true (decentralized being more expensive and saving money) is beyond me. But the effect of decentralization on effincy is clearly visible here too.
Write a twitter clone for a moderately sized community, lets say 10k with probably, 1-5% of community active at any given time. hell, even throw in activitypub if you want.
vs.
Write twitter.
I know which I'd rather do! Only one of the two is easier than rocket science! (haha)
Its inefficient because it hasn't needed to be efficient, but that will change in the future or someone else'll take over. Cascade issues are fixable. the end result is proven achievable (see telcos and the SMS systems that cover the world, global scale federated messaging exists and works!)
I believe the problem is server load. You want each server to listen and send updates to the federated feed, and forward the federated feed to the users of that instance.
What you want to avoid is a celebrity on instance A posting and then users all over the fediverse pinging instance A to get that post. Instead, instance A sends the post to the fediverse and then for any given user to view the post, they ping their own instance. That allows server requirements to be more closely tied with the number of accounts on it and how heavily they use it rather than the popularity of any given account. Additionally, it makes it so servers only have to interact with their own users and other federated servers.
Of course the downside to this is that as the fediverse as a whole grows, the volume of the federated firehose increases, which still increases the minimum requirements (processing power, bandwidth, and storage alike).
There may be middle grounds here. For example, the instance I'm on (I have no idea how common this is) stores text posts from other servers but images from are not saved, it's the originating server that serves those. Additionally, there may be the possibility of deleting old posts from the fediverse that don't have any local replies, or something like that. There are issues with the latter, especially with old friends-only posts becoming impossible to access by looking at the public profile on the original server, but I could see that being solved by something like generating a readonly token for the other server or something like that.
Won't this just end up in the situation that the far right stays on Parler and the far left goes to Mastodon? Sounds like Twitter will end up a happier place without the extremists.
> (...) the fediverse, the network of mastodon servers, (...)
This sentence at the very start already makes no sense. The above snippet makes as much sense as calling Web a network of nginx and Apache servers since nginx and Apache combined serve the majority of all web traffic.
There are services like Pleroma, Friendica, Misskey, Pixelfed, Write.as, PeerTube, and other Activity-Pub-speaking software which are NOT Mastodon or its forks. The author mentions these other pieces of software later, but pulling them them as "some part of mastodon" is at best a misnomer.
That's true of course, but seems a bit like "actually, it's GNU/Linux" to me. Mastodon currently is the "flagship" application of the Fediverse, especially as far as the current influx of new users is concerned.
At least I think we can hope that people will start to discover all the other things that the Fediverse contains ince they are there and start to use it.
Also, not sure if I'm correct, but from what I've read, the software seems to be quite influential in shaping the "de-facto standard" client/server API, at least for the "microblogging" part of the Fediverse?
Like, in theory, ActivityPub both specifies server/server and client/server interactions - however, the client/server part appears to be "underspecified and barely used" [1, 2]. e.g., AP doesn't say anything about how clients are authenticated or even how they can get notified of incoming messages/activities short of polling. This stuff is all specified in the Mastodon API.
So in practice, if I wanted to write a new client app for microblogging on the fediverse, my app would use the Mastodon API, not ActivityPub for reference. Is that correct?
Of course in the interest of avoiding centralisation, I'd agree that that's not a good state of affairs. It would be better if there was a real, widely-used standard for client/server and not just what the Mastodon devs think is useful. Though at least they cannot simply make changes to the API without convincing the majority of server admins to adopt those changes.
No, it's nothing like that. We're going to need PeerTube when YouTube reaches the bottom of its spiral of doom and we'll need Matrix when Signal eats shit as well (maybe sooner than we think.) That there is more than Mastodon to the Fediverse matters.
“GNU/Linux” is simply a subset of “Linux” tbh
Therefore “Linux” is always correct where “GNU/Linux” is, but not vice-versa.
In contrast: Mastodon and Pleroma, PeerTube, etc. are simply elements of the same set.
Can you elaborate on this? I really don't understand why you say this. In a GNU/Linux distro Linux provides the kernel, and GNU the userland tools. How can GNU/Linux be a subset of Linux? Your next sentence makes it clear you don't mean superset, so I'm lost at understanding what you mean.
(Not GP.) Things that run GNU/Linux are a subset of things that run Linux. For example, the Android phone in my hand and the old ASUS router in my closet are in the latter set, but definitely not in the former. Of course, calling my GNOME desktop GNU/Linux is about as reasonable as calling my Android phone toybox/Linux—both of the mentioned parts are there, sure, but a massive portion of the userland has been overlooked.
Not the GP, but I guess you could say a subset of systems that use the Linux kernel also provide the GNU userspace tools.
Android is an example of one that does not. Although when someone describes an OS as Linux, to me it implies GNU/Linux, so I wouldn't really call Android Linux, even if it uses the kernel.
You are right. But I deliberately kept this simple. I know I'm technically incorrect. My initial version had a whole paragraph on this. Then I moved it to a footnote. Then scrapped it entirely.
It matters exactly nothing for the point of the post. It's entirely irrelevant for the story.
I know that "technically correct is the best kind of correct". And you are technically entirely correct here. But it still doesn't matter.
Also, probably interesting to mention, is that I'm obviously well aware of this, because I'm developing Flockingbird, which is fediverse "professional social network" (think: LinkedIn)
I think the author idealizes a bit strongly here. Internet infrastructure is not a garden, so I don't think the metaphor fits. And the exponentially growing requirements for hardware and power consumption are at least a real challenge - although certainly not as extreme as with proof-of-work blockchains.
I really tried to convey your exact point. That gardening is inneffient. That I'm probably spending more CO2 because I have a rake. My neighbor buys a rake. The other neighbor buys one, etc. All with a footprint. That farmer producing millions of zucchinis probably has one rake. A tiny footprint, compared .
But energy and Co2 make the article even more convoluted. Bitcoin (PoW) even more so. And there's a major difference. In which PoW deliberately burns energy. Whereas the fediverse at least tries to burn as little as possible while remaining decentralized.
Mastodon will never have the level of censorship or control that a centralized platform like Twitter, Facebook, or TikTok have. I can't wait for it to be the norm but I doubt that it will ever happen due to the lack of censorship.
People say that they're not terribly fond of rules until they see what that's actually like, then they decide that perhaps rules aren't so bad after all.
It's easy to say that rules are 'censorship' in a vacuum, or when you're just talking with normal people, but when you get people intent on spamming or trolling or harassing, you quickly realize there's a reason human societies basically always end up with rules.
The problem is centralized rules. Different cultures has different rules. Joining it up to one platform and then enforcing one cultures rules on all the other culture is Not Okay.
There are different views on nudity around the world. Nipples are normal where I'm from.
There are different views and limitations on speech around the world.
There are different views on copyright around the world. What's the term limit?
There are different views on what constitutes animal abuse around the world. Try posting about the local bullfights on facebook. Or try posting videos from the cockfight from the cockfighting arena.
Different mastodon servers, and heck, maybe different fediverses, will fuel diversity in this regard, without One Set of Rules to Rule them All.
On some level I agree. However, a huge part of what made Twitter appealing to people is precisely that it was essentially one giant instance, with sort of shared culture and rules. While I think Mastodon is fine for some people, it may not have the same 'global appeal', limiting its ability to really be a Twitter replacement.
Makes me wonder if you can even build something like this, if decentralized systems must spend more time filtering junk, on a system which makes it easy to send it, it will always be too easy for malevolent actors to takedown.
Unless you can incur a significant cost to these activities, e.g. requiring social capital (burning social capital with e.g. hate/disinformation), or physical (e.g. access requires boxes which cost some small fee and can be blacklisted)...
Perhaps some of mastodon inefficient behavior can be leveraged here?
It’s not censorship. It’s the simplicity of the product. Social spaces succeed because they attract interesting people. In general, interesting people have the least amount of time to spend trying to maneuver through spam or wading through Nazi sympathizer/woke leftist posts. The barrier to entry has to be negligible to get the interesting people on board.
Depends on your definition of interesting people. If you mean celebrities and public figures, I agree that most will probably never join the Fediverse because of the high barrier to entry, although I think there's more to that problem than just a lack of centralized moderation.
That said, in my opinion there are plenty of interesting people in the fediverse already. Personally I don't really care if the fediverse is widely adopted by celebrities and public figures or not.
I think this article underestimates the inefficiencies in large, centralized systems where efficiency is not a goal, and incentives are weighted against it.
Famously, Facebook's iOS app is over 100 MB[0] and for Android, their engineers hacked the Dalvik VM because they had so many class definitions they were overflowing a 5MB buffer just for the definitions - and then, staggeringly, they bragged about this obscenity.[1]
I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app.
From what I've seen their datancenter stuff is way more competent
>I can only imagine their backend systems are a similar nightmare, that leads to nonsense like FB building its own data centers to run their photos-and-ads crud app.
Uh, of course they are running their own datacenters, they are one of biggest sites on net, outsourcing infrastructure to cloud makes no goddamn sense to them
From my limited experience in Big Tech, these kinds of companies are pretty good at running data centers from the hardware, networking, and low-level OS management perspectives. But their server-side programming/"backend engineering" suffers from a lot of the same problems as their mobile app development. In fact, it's frequently way worse because you can't say anything like "what if someone wants to download our app over a 3G data connection" to get people to cut down on bloat.
Overstaffing and ship-the-org-chart syndrome leads to ginormous app bundles on the client and 7000 microservices on the server.
It does look like many of the "hey, look at what cool things we do in our datacenter level infrastructure" stems from the stuff they run on that being overly complicated.
Wikipedia is one of the largest sites on the internet, and (to my knowledge) they are not running their own data centers.
> outsourcing infrastructure to cloud
Paying for AWS or building a data center are not the only two options. There are many co-location providers, there are dedicated firms with the expertise to run a data center for you...
> And so is the case with the fediverse. The six million users would "easily" fit on a mastodon on under thirty (virtual) servers, a very few large PostgreSQL database servers and a single file-server/storage. I know, because I've built and grown such Rails systems, with millions of users (on AWS). Certainly not thousands of servers. Definitely not thousands of database-servers.
> Even if Mastodon were to be rewritten in Rust, tuned, and changed into a backend that can host thousands of users on a single Raspberry-Pi running on solar power, it still is inefficient. For one, because that backend would be even more efficient when employed in a centralized setup. And secondly because there is a lot of network overhead.
Reading these two paragraphs, I was struck by how similar it is to the argument against proof-of-work cryptocurrencies, only with the oppozite conclusions. Look how wasteful, they will say, look how inefficient, and slow, and non-green it is. It's rare to hear someone argue that yes, a technology is wasteful, and it is a good thing.
Makes me want to implement some ActivityPub features on my own site, so I can get in on the fun!