Pokud chcete mít Mastodon aplikaci co nejpodobnější aplikaci Twitter, použijte oficiální aplikaci Mastodon. Je velmi jednoduchá až základní. Bez místní i světové časové osy, jen pro jeden účet, bez možnosti překládání.
Stumbling over this bugzilla comment[1] from @ebassi warning about running GUI applications as root on #Linux. That all sounds very plausible to me. The only thing that bugs me, which isn't ebassi's fault, is that when you search for "how to properly implement privilege escalation on Linux" you mainly find links to exploit howtos.
The answer is: "use polkit". Apparently, the search engine juice isn't strong enough. The worst thing is that if you search for "privilege escalation polkit", you get to pages detailing a bug in polkit.
I guess we need more guides for that. Maybe I should write one for the GNOME developer docs.
Yeah, tell me about it. I haven't come across any good guides so far. After piecing together some information I found a medium article summarizing what I had found up until that point and the author also commented on the fact that good documentation on the subject is hard to find :smile:
The admin of journa.host is publicly using and linking a scraping utility to track what instances have silenced or suspended his own.
This scraping utility is using code created by Kiwi Farms, and is hosted on the same domain as an instance he himself has suspended. So he'll suspend the instance because others have - but he's happy to use something they host.
In my opinion, this information has destroyed any good will he might have had left.
Dnes se koná pražská #Fedora 37 (pre)release party. Dojděte s námi oslavit nové vydání a podívat se, jak používá Národní technická knihovna Fedoru na veřejných počítačích. mojefedora.cz/fedora-37-prerel…
Reading this post by @aral, I wonder if there is room or a benefit in creating a single user server, that speaks ActivityPub and skips the multiuser features of the current server and is optimized for single user and concurrency.
Every time I post something that gets lots of engagement, I essentially end up carrying out a denial of service attack on myself. What does this say about the design of Mastodon and ActivityPub and the future of the fediverse?
Politické napětí mezi Aliancí a Radou stoupá. Mocní Ilusie i Paworu obracejí znovu pozornost k severu. Touží získat předmět, který by se mohl stát esem ve snaze o světovou dominanci.
This is my first overnight analysis of our home's power consumption: Phase A (blue): kitchen - mainly fridge. Phase B (magenta): livingroom and tech - server, networking, partly IoT Phase C (cyan): garden - mainly my workshop and hamradio stuff in there, raspberries, weather stations, ADS-B RX etc.
Looks pretty good I should say. Yet I need to break down the magenta consumption cuz 100W for server (HP Microserver Gen8) and some network boxes looks quite too much.
So this Monday I was finally able to get an L5 (I couldn’t before I moved because of russian customs) and since I took this week off I have partially adapted highscore to run on it instead.
No on-screen controller yet, but output was already a challenge - the shaders in retro-gtk all needed to be adapted for GLES, and in the meantime GTK broke GtkGLArea on GLES, so I also needed to bisect that. That… took a while to do on a phone.
It needed a few UI fixes as well, but that’s simpler.
„I když se moc nemění denní množství spálených kalorií, mění se účel, na který jsou spáleny. Jestli to bude na pohyb, nebo na zánět a stresové reakce.“ 💡
@archos Já to měl podobný, budík, zmatený pohyb po bytě, vzbudit #děti, hledání něčeho co si vezmou na sebe a skoro běh do školky aby se to stihlo :D ,, a teď tedy ta dobrá #káva :D .. jak píšeš .. k nezaplacení 🤣
@pavel Jj vím, budu muset teď o víkendu se na to vrhnout. Mám i více aplikací Bitwarden, Nextcloud, Joplin, Matrix s mosty na WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook, Signal. A ještě pár dalších 😀 Ale nějak nic nestíhám , kdyby někdo chtěl pomoc budu jen rád 👍
@Archos :distros_arch: :xmpp: Ja mám v základe to isté, ale úmyselne len pre seba a pár priateľov. Všetko z balíčkov ručne konfigurované na #archlinux. Ak by bola užitočná nejaká spolupráca typu sledovať prevádzku, niečo niekam podľa potreby migrovať, dozrieť na aktualizácie, alebo len ako náhradný kontakt, keď pôjdeš na výlet, rád prispejem, čo bude potrebné.
@sesivany To jo, je to síla. Já to teď chci nechát chvilku usadit, kolik lidí bude aktivní. Ono už bylo znát ve špičce kolem osmé, tak se už příspěvky trochu zpomalovaly. Ale jinak je to v pohodě, ale je pravda, že hodně lidí se jen registrovalo.
@vilda Tak zrovna Fosstodon má taky uzavřené registrace. K nám se registrovalo přes tisíc lidí během týdne. Finance musím začít také řešit. Zatím vše dotuji.
Bylo by pak možné ukázat nějaké data, jak nároky na server rostou při X množství uživatelů? Bylo by to dle mě celkem zajímavé, aby se dal udělat obrázek o tom, co na jak velkou instanci je potřeba.
@vilda Nároky přímo nesouvisejí s počtem uživatelů na danném serveru. Mnohem důležitější je s kolika dalšími servery federuješ a jak jsou uživatelé aktivní tam.
@Mac_CZ @vilda 😀😀 já už to chci také dat jinam, ale nějak není čas. Mám VPS s 1Tb a jen to udělat. Doma, nemůžu, mám ještě starou elektriku a občas vypadne proud. Všeho časem 😀
Purism makes premium phones, laptops, mini PCs and servers running free software on PureOS. Purism products respect people's privacy and freedom while protecting their security.
We love freedom 3, the freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others. Boost this post to share the message with others! Plus watch our latest video about free software: u.fsf.org/escape-to-freedom
since a lot of folks are becoming newly interested in escaping corporate silos and moving to community-based services, are you aware of @matrix?
Matrix is to Slack and Discord, what Mastodon is to Twitter: a decentralized, federated network based on open standards/specs. It also supports full end-to-end encryption, just like Signal, so you can exchange messages privately!
If you find the fediverse interesting/inspiring, I recommend giving matrix a whirl. The quickest way to get started is to head over to app.element.io/ and make a (free!) account (although you can also join any number of other home servers, or host your own--they all talk to each other!).
If you _do_ end up checking it out, please do say hi! I'm @zkat:zkat.tech over there. I also manage a "space" (a group of channels, kinda like a Discord server) that you can join by clicking here: matrix.to/#/!tKdDSgQTxQzcOuTXq…
I hope this sparks your interest! I'd love to see you over there, too!
You're invited to talk on Matrix. If you don't already have a client this link will help you pick one, and join the conversation. If you already have one, this link will help you join the conversation
@alpsoy this? it’s the stuff needed for the app to work. how can you do location sharing without access to location data? how can you find out which of your contacts are on the app without (optionally) checking contact data?
@nat @alpsoy This is not true, and never has been true - there is no “central server” in matrix, and metadata isn’t exposed to it. only the servers participating in a given room necessarily see the metadata of that room.
@alpsoy Its also worth considering that matrix metadata is not completely private. It was a while ago i checked but i remember usernames get exposed to central server and only way to increase privacy is to fully defederate. Plan your community there yes, plan your revolution there no.
@childishgiant idk, I'm feeling pretty good about the improvements that have happened in Element over the past couple of years, and they've got new mobile apps coming up soon that are even nicer. I wouldn't say the UX is awful.
I recentlyish spoke to someone who works at element who said that internally they use discord ... until they can dog food I'm not going near it I think 😅
@childishgiant Element has exclusively dogfooded Matrix since day 1; the only other comms tool in use is an IRC server in case of a catastrophe on Matrix. Some folks might use Discord personally; that’s their call :)
@ticho @alpsoy no, last time we checked verification can only be done through element client. so what's the use of other clients if there's just one client (element) to "rule em all"... (and element is just so heavy/laggish).
if things are changed by now, and other clients work without the need for element, it might be time for a new try.. (is it?)
I already did something similar few weeks ago (had to set up manually the new method) and it worked. Will i have to do it/something again? It didn’t require admin approval, it worked very smoothly
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We should be having this conversation about user consent, expectations and instance policies *now* before you end up having to explain why your cool cool paper about Fedi is getting retracted
The way I like to frame it is that there is a distinction between - technical problems - product problems - user problems
The first two are the most salient - and usually most rewarded - problems for the product team. But no matter how many of those problems you solve, your user doesn't care. #UXDesign
Brought an old Atom-PC running #netbsd back online, upgraded to 9.3, and compiling @libreoffice. It may take a few more days to build this puppy. Yes, I could use precompiled pkgsrc packages but I wanted to watch this paint drying.
Every time I post something that gets lots of engagement, I essentially end up carrying out a denial of service attack on myself. What does this say about the design of Mastodon and ActivityPub and the future of the fediverse?
This is fantastic. I wrote about this today, and one of my thoughts was "The wrong(right?) person joining the instance you run can very well bankrupt you". Also, sorry for adding to the misery.
while I understand the concern I fail to see how having smaller instances would solve the problem. If I understand correctly every time you send a toot it needs to be sent to each instance that hosts at least one of your followers. It means that if there was one instance per user it would require more work. What am I missing?
A long time ago, before even Geocities, I had a blog that had enough traffic to get noticed, and I was approached by a researcher at the University of Georgia offering me free hosting so long as uptime wasn't critical.
The site was called Dragonfire. The experiment was squeezing as much power out of a commodity white box as technically possible. It was overclocked to the hilt, water cooled, and the name was chosen after some coffee spilled on the case and started boiling.
That's a great write-up. It does have me thinking about the horizontal scalability of the fediverse though. If it _has_ to be a cartesian product of servers to servers for popular posts, or we could use an intermediary that's more efficient (just like the web does for publishing content on a CDN).
that's the screen I (and probably every #mastoadmin) was checking regularly in the last few days 😁 Our instance is not that big, but seems to be integrated in the network, we hit 500k 1.5 weeks ago, steering towards 1M events/day. It's really interesting when you're hosting the hardware yourself (especially as a hobby project) and can't easily scale up CPUs, but switching to nvme really payed off. We currently run 2 sidekiq processes at 10 treads each, with basically zero queue backlog.
thank you for the patience of constantly explaining to newbies like me the dark side of 'being big'. I still couldn't get in depth to your 'Small Web' concept, but I'll do it ASAP. ~ And thank you also for being so polite to answer individually to every message :)
@alx Thanks, Alessandra, that’s very kind of you to say. And, hey, we’re all newbies at all this to one degree or other. Here’s to figuring things out and making things better together :)
PS. If there’s anything that doesn’t make sense about the Small Web stuff I’ve written, etc., please just ask. I’m always trying to improve/simplify how I explain things and it’ll help me to know which bits are confusing.
Wow! 😂 In light of this, I’m even more impressed that you actually thanked me in person for the birthday wish. I only just now - thanks to @Saket - realized how many followers you have and what that means for your instance as you interact with folks here. Hats off to you, sir! Now, let’s see you *not* reply to this. You can do it!
This is a really helpful framing for the problem, and seems like something we're going to have to grapple with sooner rather than later. A few questions spring to mind:
- What is the current cost of maintaining an identity, as a function of followers, activity, media, etc? - How much can that be optimized in the code? Through protocol improvements? - Assuming the optimized cost is still non-trivial, are there significant advantages to shared hosting?
do you see a technical solution to combine the desired small size of instances with the current limitations of how Fedi works (and was not designed to scale in terms of number of interconnected instances either)? See e.g. infosec.exchange/@WPalant/1093… for instance
If I understand you correctly, single-tenant instances (with no other changes) would mean N followers = N sidekiq jobs per interaction. It seems like the only way to ensure processing power grow with engagement is some kind of bittorrent-driven thing - servers hosting your post promise to seed to a certain ratio / similarly users reading posts seed them as long as they remain on the page, similarly to PeerTube.
There’s some tension between the points you make and the notion of the small instance hosting a community of exercise enthusiasts or esperantistoj.
As both you and @profcarroll point out, a well connected small instance can be quite resource intensive. A poorly connected instance is a virtual ghost town. Could some of this be solved by using lighter weight ActivityPub software? (Misskey or Pleroma)
In your post you talk about your server (which I assume is some sort of virtual private server) having 12 sidekiq threads and can deliver an ActivityPub update to 12 other servers at a time.
Do you have any idea how much performance the virtual server provided by mastohost has in values that allow a comparison to other VPSes? As in, what is "a sidekiq thread" for the server running it, do you get one sidekiq thread per CPU? Is CPU speed of the server, the web connection, or speed of the recieving server (e.g. if it needs to acknowledge recieving the ActivityPub push) the limiting factor for the speed at which such a sidekiq job executes? Maybe @hugo can provide some info on this?
really nice post! I wonder if some of this can be solved on the protocol level… Like fanning out the messages to a handful of recipients who help in broadcasting them to the rest. But I’m sure it’s not a simple matter.
-- The day I join Mastodon I learn about weaknesses. This is a great, thought-provoking article! I'm about to start looking for an Elxir implementation of Mastodon...
I'm very new to mastodon, and still trying to learn the basics of how it is structured. Your article has been very informative and, though coming from a very different and more-practical perspective, increasingly seems to raise concerns along the same lines as I've had as I've been reading about this.
Specifically: that this thing seems to be too centralised (lots of little centralised servers, but still centralised), and (if I'm reading correctly) only a single level of federation?
how efficient is Ruby these days? I'm hoping there's still a lot of optimisation that can be done over time to save on CPU cycles and bandwidth that will help instance admins to scale without having to keep throwing hardware and money at the problem.
This is concerning. It seems to imply that decentralization is impossible long term for most people.
I see this going in the direction of celebrities creating Mastodon instances and starting to post ads to users on their instance, and possibly charge users for the benefit of getting priority access to their posts. (You can see them before the sync jobs run for other instances).
I guess if you want freedom from that you just need to live with a worse experience, at least you have the choice.
Thanks, genuinely interesting and thought provoking. I’m barely known anywhere and my first instinct was to setup my own instance, if only to have some control over my presence.
This does present other challenges you don’t cover - natural follows from things like being in a local timeline just aren’t there. There really is a strong incentive for providers and users for centralisation.
Short of a fully P2P (ala Chord/Pastry) system, genuinely stumped on technical solutions here.
Interesting post. Any reason why you've not set your instance UI to single user mode so it defaults to your profile page. Just interested to know as just in process of setting my own instance up
@techonify is that something that needs to be configured in the config files? It could then be that @aral's host, mastohost, hasn't built in the option to change that.
very interesting Aral thanks. Something I don't quite follow though - I understand why large instances are socially bad, and should be discouraged for that reason, but I don't understand how smaller / single-user instances solve the @stephenfry problem. Isn't that problem fundamentally that each of his followers needs to be contacted? How does smaller instances change that?
Thank you for the write up. It encourages me to make the effort to create my own instance. However, I fear more that I will exhaust the limited bandwidth of my internet connection than I do for the processing power of my aging server.
I think you're on to something, but the concept of single-user instances is taking too far. Your instance does a lot of work pulling in your federated timeline, but that work only benefits one user: you.
If you have a 300-user instance, but those 300 people follow a lot of the same people, the load-per-user is significantly lower.
It's a plain truism in performance engineering that if you free up one bottleneck, say the overhead on the queue itself, then the bottleneck will move and it may well mean that waiting on read or write locks becomes mutual deadlocks.
Or more prosaically running out of connections, handles to a dependent service. All those are resolvable with effort.
This is a great essay, and articulates extremely well a number of concerns that I have had while reading other descriptions of how Mastodon is different or better because of its architecture.
I have been feeling like the kid in the Emperor's New Clothes, looking around me and going "can no-one else see what I'm seeing???"
This is a very good point and why I didn't follow Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman or Greta Thunberg. All are great people.I know if they toot anything, it will finds it's way to me regardless.
Maybe its just me, but if it's that expensive to be moderately popular, I just don't see that working for the majority of people, at all. We should work to help trustworthy orgs see the opportunity to be valuable to their stakeholders and possibly to have a revenue stream. I imagine professional orgs, to which people are already paying dues, running servers and adding rel=me tags to pages in their professional directories.
How much trouble is caused by network traffic, how much by slow software? Ruby is extremely slow. What would be the effect of reimplementing Mastodon in a language like Go?
thanks for sharing your insights! I read that single user servers were inefficient somewhere, but can't remember where. I think it had to do with how there's some economy in scale built in when multiple people follow others from the same other server or something. It seems to me that we could scale efficiently without everyone having to have their own server. Like, there must be a middle ground between too large and too small
It's *very* weird having people suddenly showing in my timeline who joined 24hrs ago and have thousands of follows. Weird. Maybe a new fedi option would be to filter out ppl with over x number of follows? I don't read Local or Global.
Ah, the very sudden and extreme growing pains of Mastodon. Issues that will have to be addressed, if large-scale adoption and repeat usage is desired (is it desired?). Also, HOW do you get to see number of favorites, responses, et al on your posts? Mine are always blank, no matter how much engagement a post gets. It's like I throw a post out into the ether and have to guess about what's happening with it.
@katco mstdn.social was an hour behind on sidekiq, yet I could go to my posts and see all the responses instant time. It was just notifications that were delayed, which isn't hugely critical. Maybe the source server was caught up on their jobs, though... And dest server is only responsible for notification in that case.
I've just been arguing with someone else that we need a protocol that keeps the size of any "frictionless" community to a small multiple of Dunbar's number, so it's very nice to see your argument along the same lines.
I'm more interested in creating (small) common spaces than personal ones, though
And I'm struck by the irony of "I want to flee Twitter because Musk might charge for it" being met with, "The best way to Mastodon is to pay $ for your own instance"
I guess, the same apply to the Matrix chat system.
Can we make running software easier? I do work in IT (as a developer, a system administrator and now as product owner) and I do not have the energy and time to run my own instances.
Since I've been in the information-centric networking group at #IETF115, I'd like to add that this kind of tech would be a good complement to the small web notion.
The basic principle is that you're not looking to speak to a server, but asking the network where a piece of information is. So if my machine has already received Aral's post, then it's as legitimate a source of this post as his own, etc. Load spreads out.
a fun solution mostly for you Aral is to run your web service on a cheap VPS and your sidekiq in a cluster. so each time you say something you can scale up your sidekiq cluster, until the wave passes and then scale it back down again. it's still insane that you should have to pay so much just to participate in social media though. I run my mastodon in k8s so I'll create an autoscaler setup that does this for me.
that was a very interesting read, with links for much food for thought (that I will be digesting in the coming days and weeks).
After the Frying risk assessment and you instance-of-one birthday saga, I was hesitating to follow and reply... but did in the end. I will keep the tooting low though 🙂
fascinating read! And now I know it’s my Sidekiq container I need to beef up. I tooted at @Gargron and had a sudden spike of 5000+ requests hit my server and it fell over. I presumed it was the web container failing to deal with it.
@katco I wouldn't want to scare big names off for a small technical issue. SideKiq jobs aren't the best solution for this. People won't put in the work to improve the scaling until it's a real issue and it won't be a real issue until big names are in the fediverse
Somewhat agree, strongly disagree with many conclusions.
Single-tenant #instances are a ruthless attack on our planet.
#Mastodon is conceptually flawed with topical communities expressing themselves mainly via a local #timeline. Lists: poorly implemented. Federated #groups: a.gup.pe hacks
Look at the self-descriptions of any instance focused on a large #community, and ask yourself who could afford to *not* register at the *one* place where the *action* is.
Really interesting article - this seems to be the major problem with choosing "push to notify" instead of "poll for notificatoins".
Hard problem to solve - the current structure disincentives producing good content that people want to follow - a problem that remains EVEN if you're using your solo-instance.
judging by how many of the replies to this post still include at-mentions to Fry and Thunberg despite their replies not actually being relevant to them, I also wonder if support for BCC rather than CC would be useful. ;)
Aside from that, it does sound like (as others in the replies have also remarked) that more smaller instances would actually increase the traffic?
Final note: you mistyped 'extinguish' as 'entinguish'. ;)
Maybe a solution, especially for accounts with a lot of followers like you, is to be more intentional in your chattiness (and this could be a habit or norm across the fediverse).
You want to reply to everyone, but do all those replies have to be public posts? If you just want to say a "thank you" or a small courtesy back to someone you know ("thanks! how's your cat?"), you could make it a Direct Post. The way Mastodon puts these in thread for you and the other person like any other post (rather than jusr in a separate DM inbox) works great for this!
Unless I am really wrong about how Mastodon handles these, it would only be one jog going out to the one instance of that user, rather than broadcasting to everyone who follows you.
There's probably an analogy here about how you are using a high power concert PA system to broadcast a separate reply to every single person in the stadium audience, when instead you could just mingle into to crowd later and directly chat with each attendee (and Hugo is powering the PA by running on a treadmill backstage).
If you reply to this message from me with a simple "thanks, great point!" It could be a Direct Post. If you have some commentary or correction of value to your followers, keep it Public!
can i say: awesome article👏 ? Sorry but not sorry, i don’t think limiting oneself per se is the solution. One should defo think what they are hoping to achieve by communicating, and people could abide to some basic principles (power surge hours etc) if/when needed (think Ukraine). But otherwise it is by interacting that we learn and grow, incl learn about #communication itself, so let’s not shut up just yet!
Self hosting is the way. After I joined, my first thoughts were "K neat, how do I host my own?" Great article, my initial afterthoughts:
Instances need to be capable of a kind mitosis for when they get too large.
Throw more lvls of decentralization at instance level blocking?
With this 3000 requests loading up issue, perhaps there is a way to redistribute those requests so other instances can share a set amount of resources when they are below a certain load threshold? Hmm.
I have to ask, how much of what you describe is intrinsic in the problem space, how much is intrinsic in the particulars of the design, and how much is intrinsic in the implementation of Mastodon in particular? Sidekiq seems a particularly poor choice to fire off 3000 tasks a few times an hour. Would different technology choices help, or is the problem space itself just inherently prone to this kind of scale problem?
@TallBaldDesi It’s a network of people who communicate with each other using a protocol called ActivityPub. We’re doing it right now as we have this conversation. When you wrote your question, your Mastodon server used the ActivityPub protocol to find me and send it to me. My server (which could be running Mastodon or any other piece of software that runs the ActivityPub protocol) would do the same to get my message to you. A protocol is just a set of rules for communicating that we agree on.
great read. maybe part of the problem with breaking up instances is the perceived cost and effort to maintain one . probably the same as maintaining an email server.
This may have been broached already and I just missed it but is mastodon designed to handle replies/likes interserver the same way it does intraserver?
Meaning is the massive increase in resources you saw a product of your account being on its own server and everyone else being on different servers?
@darthmole Afaik, it should be far more efficient to distribute intra-server messages. That’s one of the erroneous incentives for vertical scale. If I was on mastodon.social and my ~23,000 followers were also on mastodon.social, there wouldn’t be a problem. Mastodon is designed to handle that without breaking a sweat. And hey, did you notice, we just recreated Twitter.com?… oops! :)
thanks for the reply! I see I misunderstood your article earlier.
The comment about having your own server if you had a lot of followers was meant to be a workaround to limit resource issues for the many due to the way mastodon was designed to handle interserver communications?
Would I be accurate in stating that your article was stating that the fact it handles intraserver communications so much better actually hurts itself and its mission as a decentralized champion?
great thoughts. Where’s the happy medium for an instance? Maybe if a Mastadon instance was limited to/sharded by those who followed each other, that would create some natural limits as even the most popular accounts follow few people.
I just read your post about the overall benefits of more Mastodon instances and how people should be encouraged to create their own.
My son has been working on his own instance by following the official docs. This really needs to be a lot easier to do, though.
#Linode and #DigitalOcean have very easy installation options although these options are pretty expensive compared to a similar VM option at a hosting provider like #Hetzner, for example.
This is a repository of apps to be used with F-Droid. Applications in this repository are official binaries built by the original application developers, taken from their resp. repositories (mostly Github).
whoa --- RT @Imposter_Edits This man has combined his impressionist skills with deepfake video editing and its way past creepy. twitter.com/Imposter_Edits/sta…
It looks like Fedora could be taking on more mobile ambitions with a Phosh image now proposed for running that Wayland shell focused on smartphones and tablets while delivering a good GNOME-based experience
Legal fund for Alex Norris, creator of Webcomic Name (the 'oh no' comics)
A publishing company they partnered to make a board game with a few years ago has used the opportunity to take all of their intellectual property/claimed ownership of Webcomic Name as a whole :/ From what I read, seems like its not the first time this publishing company have done that either. gofundme.com/f/alexnorrislegal…
Thank you!
Archos
in reply to Sklenickaf85 • • •