Federated networks like Mastodon and Lemmy are going to get people well-acquainted with websites shutting down. It's hard work (time, money, etc.) to run these things for people, and people start to really lean on them.
It's almost novel now days getting sucked into something that shuts down. killedbygoogle.com is a meme partly I think because websites shutting down is just so uncommon in areas that we get personally invested in.
I run my own Lemmy instance just for my self and even that can be trying sometimes. I enjoy using it instead of reddit, but one day I will probably shut it down and be sad.
jchw 28 minutes ago [-]
I'm starting to think nostr was barking up the right tree after all. Put as much complexity into the client as possible and make the servers dumb and completely uncoordinated, utterly interchangeable. Spam your broadcasts to any relay that will listen. No idea if it actually works (I've read a lot about nostr and AT proto but never used either of them) but I think it's very obvious that any system that deeply relies on some company that everyone becomes extremely reliant on (including AT proto/Bluesky) is only a couple steps away from the same sort of problems as centralization.
Of course, the real gold standard would be P2P, if only it could work. But... mobile phones can't burn battery running P2P clients in the background, everyone's under a NAT these days, and some types of software (like microblogging networks) would be horrifically untractable as a P2P system.
Oh well. At the very least, I really love the concept of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). I'd like to see more stuff like that.
OgsyedIE 52 minutes ago [-]
Besides the monetary costs of operating small fora there are also significant competence hurdles. Site owners who manage to hit a couple thousand users have to figure out spam handling, automated content moderation (including photoDNA and the required reporting if they host images), registering a DMCA agent with the copyright office, setting up an LLC, assessing their needs for COPPA, GDPR and CCPA, their site's tax situation and anything they may want to do involving employing others (such as T&S) without getting burnt out. The median size for a forum getting its first subpoena is 4,300 users.
Managing all of that is easily learnable in a couple months if they have time, disposable income and few distractions but surprisingly few people who have site management thrust upon them know about these things in advance. To most people who think about running an internet anything the above are unknown unknowns. You can't go looking for things you don't know exist, so burnout is high.
hifikuno 2 hours ago [-]
I, too, ran my own instance. I enjoyed it for some time but I've now moved to the omg.lol ecosystem. I feel that by paying a little money for it that I have a higher chance of the server not shutting down.
r3trohack3r 43 minutes ago [-]
Federated networks like Mastadon strike me as being centralization at scale.
They don’t appear to solve any of the power dynamics of users and operators - users are still at the mercy of the operator - and they run on either altruism or monetization.
Mastadon appears to have successfully created N copies of the Facebook problem, which is definitely better than where we were.
MBCook 13 minutes ago [-]
I like Mastodon, it’s the only Twitter like thing I use.
But I think this just reflects the facts. Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. Just like in the only big federated service: email.
Yes you can run your own. But there are a lot of costs in terms of time/complexity/knowledge/trust to that.
Outsourcing it to someone else is really nice.
You don’t need one big instance like Twitter was. Having a small handful of big ones works well too.
But the dream some people seemed to have where everyone should run their own instance alone or with a few friends was never going to happen.
LeoPanthera 29 minutes ago [-]
> users are still at the mercy of the operator
Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose.
ketzo 5 minutes ago [-]
I think OP’s point is that most users don’t choose to do so. Whether because of lack of ability, interest, time, whatever, people would mostly rather just be users.
NelsonMinar 22 minutes ago [-]
Aw too bad, this has been a really useful service. I wonder if anyone wants to pick it up? The post mentions part of the problem is Mastodon's implementation being a poor match to high volume bots. You could imagine other architectures that were more efficient for this use case, it'd be a fun yak shaving exercise.
If anyone needs to migrate their own projects I've had good luck with feed2toot, to post RSS to a Mastodon account on a ordinary server. It's been around a long time now and seems reliable.
op00to 5 minutes ago [-]
Thanks, botsin.space! It was fun while it lasted!
Kye 2 hours ago [-]
I've had lots of fun calling it bot sin space. It will be missed.
tjwds 2 hours ago [-]
This is incredibly sad; botsin.space has been a steady stream of joy for me over the years. Here's hoping a bunch of alternatives pop up.
stavros 1 hours ago [-]
What was it?
acherion 1 hours ago [-]
A mastodon instance where bots were welcomed.
scudsworth 48 minutes ago [-]
>Over the years, the server has grown to have around a few thousand active accounts, which isn't all that many. However, they've generated something like 32 million statuses. Just to put that in perspective, mastodon.social has over 2 million users, who have generated around 110 million statuses.
unsurprising that the bots would outpace organic users, but wow, what a ratio. i'd be curious to see this data charted over time
pietervdvn 60 minutes ago [-]
RIP!
Thanks for hosting this all those years. I'll try to find a new home for my bot.
shadowgovt 50 minutes ago [-]
Safe travels to a known name.
One of the reasons I maintain a node with only one user is I fear the day I'll be responsible for other people's social media presence; I could easily see myself going "It's just a few thousand users" and the next thing I know I'm asking whether I can keep this thing going (and agonizing over what it'll do to my users to cut the service). And unlike Colin, I despise Rails and wouldn't have the patience to hammer on it when it starts to misbehave.
Props to Colin having the guts to take the risk.
Rendered at 23:35:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It's almost novel now days getting sucked into something that shuts down. killedbygoogle.com is a meme partly I think because websites shutting down is just so uncommon in areas that we get personally invested in.
I run my own Lemmy instance just for my self and even that can be trying sometimes. I enjoy using it instead of reddit, but one day I will probably shut it down and be sad.
Of course, the real gold standard would be P2P, if only it could work. But... mobile phones can't burn battery running P2P clients in the background, everyone's under a NAT these days, and some types of software (like microblogging networks) would be horrifically untractable as a P2P system.
Oh well. At the very least, I really love the concept of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs). I'd like to see more stuff like that.
Managing all of that is easily learnable in a couple months if they have time, disposable income and few distractions but surprisingly few people who have site management thrust upon them know about these things in advance. To most people who think about running an internet anything the above are unknown unknowns. You can't go looking for things you don't know exist, so burnout is high.
They don’t appear to solve any of the power dynamics of users and operators - users are still at the mercy of the operator - and they run on either altruism or monetization.
Mastadon appears to have successfully created N copies of the Facebook problem, which is definitely better than where we were.
But I think this just reflects the facts. Centralization works and is highly preferable for many users. Just like in the only big federated service: email.
Yes you can run your own. But there are a lot of costs in terms of time/complexity/knowledge/trust to that.
Outsourcing it to someone else is really nice.
You don’t need one big instance like Twitter was. Having a small handful of big ones works well too.
But the dream some people seemed to have where everyone should run their own instance alone or with a few friends was never going to happen.
Mastodon allows you to be the operator, if you so choose.
If anyone needs to migrate their own projects I've had good luck with feed2toot, to post RSS to a Mastodon account on a ordinary server. It's been around a long time now and seems reliable.
unsurprising that the bots would outpace organic users, but wow, what a ratio. i'd be curious to see this data charted over time
Thanks for hosting this all those years. I'll try to find a new home for my bot.
One of the reasons I maintain a node with only one user is I fear the day I'll be responsible for other people's social media presence; I could easily see myself going "It's just a few thousand users" and the next thing I know I'm asking whether I can keep this thing going (and agonizing over what it'll do to my users to cut the service). And unlike Colin, I despise Rails and wouldn't have the patience to hammer on it when it starts to misbehave.
Props to Colin having the guts to take the risk.