Mastodon is not just a social network among others, it's a social network CONNECTED to others, with all their content, all their users available from all these places, with no middleman involved. This is the Fediverse. This is big. 👉 blog.castopod.org/the-fedivers…
A small group of #blind people have come together to raise funds, after 11 blind children were killed in a fire at Uganda’s Salama School for the Blind. This is such a terrible tragedy and there is considerable need. Times are tough right now, but if you have a little to spare and would like to, I’m sure they would be grateful if you #donate. gofundme.com/f/eedz7x-help-sal…
Ještě malé přiblížení k #fediverse Zde super článek od @sesivany blog.eischmann.cz/2019/01/07/f… Představte si, že jste primárně na Twitteru, protože vám forma microbloggingu vyhovuje, ale chcete sledovat jednoho kamaráda na Instagramu. Sociální síť založená na obrázcích vás jinak nebere a nechcete tam mít účet a sledovat ji, ale rádi byste příspěvky kamaráda sledovali, reagovali na ně, psali komentáře. Kdyby byl Twitter a Instagram ve fediverse, šlo by to.
Myšlenka otevřených navzájem komunikujících sociálních sítí zní pěkně, ale realita je taková, že nejpopulárnější sociální sítě jsou dnes uzavřené zahrady. A i mezi lidmi, kteří jinak prosazují otev…
Přesto, že se to stalo včera, tak chci vyjádřit upřímnou soustrast. Odešla skvělá režisérka Marie Poledňáková. Její komedie jako "Jak dostat tatínka do polepšovny" " Jak vytrhnout velrybě stoličku" tu s námi budou pořád. Nechala za sebou velikou stopu v české kinematografii. Odpočívejte v pokoji paní režisérko.🕊️❤️
Jen pro přiblížení co je #fediverse Fediverse je obří síť služeb sociálních médií. Existují zde platformy pro mikroblogování, blogování, fotoblogování, videohosting a mnoho dalších a všechny jsou vzájemně propojené nebo federované. Ke sledování uživatelů na kterékoli z platforem vám tedy stačí jeden účet.
Krásné středeční #dobre_ranko přátelé #mastodon Už se nám naše instance opět trošičku rozrostla. Některé účty znám ještě z dob, kdy jsem začínal s Linuxem. Tak užívejte pohody ve světě #fediverse a #opensource
Data processed from Voyager 2 Mission during its Neptune Encounter 1989-08-31 (Narrow angle camera) Download all sizes up to 3K: Here Coverage for cloud features on crescent Neptune at 8988249 km.
@lordshedy Bohužel, jsem nevěřící Tomáš, nějak se mi též nezdá, že by DN použila zrovna instanci Arch-Linuxu. 🤷🏼♂️ Je nějaká oficiální cesta ověření profilu zde na Mastodonu? Někde jsem četl vložením stránky do popisu profilu, kterou osoba vlastní, ale nevím, jak to funguje.
@Cooba13 @lukas Ale na druhou stranu, je to skvělá příležitost lidem ukázat, že #opensource není jen pro skupinu linuxáků a nadšenců, ale že jsou zde i skvělé aplikace 👍👍
Osobně si tipuju, že paní Nerudová vyhraje. Přece jenom ne každý chce generála za prezidenta, navíc paní Nerudová konzistentně v průzkumech stoupá a je aktivní. Uvidíme, jak budou vypadat televizní debaty před volbami, osobně se ale těším: je to vždycky sranda kopec.
Surprised to learn that support for the ARIA log role is reportedly pretty good. Anyone have direct experience with that? a11ysupport.io/tech/aria/log_r… #aria #a11y
I just got this baby in the post today! I'm *extremely* excited to be playing on it, but also, I'm already thinking how much I'd Iove to write a little visual novel for it 👀 It's such a fun form factor. Like reading a short novel in paperback rather than hardcover. It feels more... manageable?
I should get started posting stuff I guess? My main obsessions are ships and architecture. And trees. Trees are cool. Oh and robots. Here are some of those things.
As someone who grew at a time where email was an unquestioned, decentralized foundation of #FreeSoftware workflows, moves like leave a bad taste in my mouth. I understand how Discourse facilitates onboarding, but the idea of delegating to a central server and using the browser as the sole user interface remains unappealing to me.
Mailman is a terrible UX. Spam is out of control (fortunately not visible to list members, but for list admins, it's a huge problem). The problems with mailing list dynamics are well documented, and I'm happy that Discourse has been written explicitly with an eye to mitigating them.
GNOME mailing lists have a central server as well, so I don't understand the point. It's not like you could send emails to any random server and have them appear in a list.
In any case, mailing lists are terrible for moderation, onboarding, and spam—just like anything that is based on email. Email is a centralised game, these days, unless you want everything to be marked as spam, and have nobody receive anything.
In any case: you can interact with Discourse via email as well.
@ebassi I’ve found Discourse’s onboarding features smart—messages essentially getting you to learn the etiquette, to better understand where the other person is talking from (whether they’re a newcomer or not), and so on. It probably helps lower the barrier to entry and make interactions smoother.
(I find it intriguing though that we need such “social prostheses” in the first place; is the on-line etiquette too different from real-life interactions?)
@khinsen @ebassi I like the idea too. Maybe Discourse’s email support goes in that direction? Delta Chat seems to be for small groups, from what I understand.
@khinsen @ebassi Do you know if Discourse supports email as a primary way of interaction? Is it possible to interact with a thread without registration on the discourse instance?
@abcdw @khinsen No, you can't do that. You need to have an account on the Discourse instance.
Depending on the configuration of the instance, you may also need to actually browse it and interact with it a bit to raise your user level, before you can open topics just by sending an email.
@ebassi @khinsen 😔 I really like the way it looks, but don't like the fact that for each interaction with any new project I have to create an account on gitlab/gitea instance to send a simple patch or to comment on the ongoing discussion, it seems that adding one more registration requiring tool will only increase this pain.
@abcdw @khinsen That's not our experience. Though, of course, if you start contributing a lot to GNOME, you can ask to get an LDAP account, and then you get single-sign-on for all GNOME services.
If you're referring to being able to send patches via email, that's just false economy: you have a steep set up cost (git send-email is not a simple thing), and then you get stuck with patches over email, which is a fate worse than death.
@ebassi @khinsen I mean the case, when you contribute to various FOSS projects on different platforms/forges. Maybe forgefed will make it less painful someday.
I agree the set up process is tough and there are not much good modern tools, but after initial configuration the experience is quite pleasant and in addition to that it's also offline-friendly. YMMV of course.
@ebassi @khinsen @abcdw Which is “a fate worse than death” is a matter of perspective. I’m not saying patch over email doesn’t have its warts, but you’ll find many free software hackers disagree with this assessment.
@khinsen @abcdw Only the Linux kernel devs "enjoy" patches over email, because they have sunk a massive amount of time in their ad hoc tools. It's a textbook case of sunk cost fallacy. Everybody else either never used email to deal with contributions, or moved away from the patches-in-an-email-thread model over time
What happens when you have your own Mastodon instance (just for you) where over 21,000 people follow you and when you’re following over 4,300 people?
You end up paying ~€50/month for Mastodon hosting 👀
It also opens up interesting questions: what happens when a popular account joins your instance (hint: it will probably cost the instance maintainers quite a bit… I don’t envy the mastodon.nu folks right now).
It’s possible if all the celebs join one instance the cost will have a plateau, because Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez are followed by people on the same servers.
that all looks familiar. We're in a separate backchannel with several instance maintainers if you want to discuss scaling tips. DM me if you want the link
one specific tip: create more processes rather than more threads for sidekiq. @joenepraat wrote up what he did (and most scaling instances do): github.com/mastodon/mastodon/d…
Sidekiq on my servers have problems coping with the strong increase of new Mastodon users in the fediverse. Especially the default queue has a latency in the afternoon and evening (EU time) between...
I think that this sort of problem scales out much better if you are on a shared instance.
The way I understand it, instances share content with each other when needed. So if you are following 4k people, but 3k of those have already been followed by others on your instance, you share that traffic :>
Plus, instance-internal follows are cheap, and you get a more even usage of your resources rather than "mostly nothing until someone very popular posts"
any indication how frequent @mastohost clears out the media cache? I have the little moon plan and I’m already near 8gb of media. To move up to the next tier isn’t a big deal…but knowing if/when the media cache is cleared out wouldn’t hurt — especially if that will let me not bump up to my limit in a week or two.
I think this is the biggest potential problem (very real problem we’re starting to see) with the fediverse in general… a large number of connections grows the federation and communication required exponentially, not linearly. This is difficult enough to deal with in a centralized network, but in a distributed one it becomes an even more complex challenge.
Great food for thought regarding Fediverse economics. I think it makes for a compelling argument to investigate Mastodon alternatives.
I’m considering starting a Pleroma instance. It seems to be a lighter weight option, and for whatever feature parity it misses with Mastodon, might make up for that fact being compatible with Mastodon client apps. pleroma.social/
Maybe technology like IPFS could be implemented where only the creator of the message stores the entire entry and other servers in the network store the hash of the message.
this probably mainly demonstrate how resource-heavy Mastodon is… I would be curious to know the result in a lighter software such as Pleroma (which is very similar, feature-wise).
And this is an issue for small hosting and big ones too…
Excited to see where you go with this. I'm dubious about the benefit of moving from corporately-controlled platforms to individually-controlled fiefdoms. Full decentralization is what we need, not cyber-HOAs.
You can find much better deals by running your own VPS. I have a 3CPU/2.5GB/40GBSSD/6.5TB-bandwidth-er-month VPS running my instance and it costs me US$24 per *year*. See lowendbox.com/blog/2-usd-vps-c…
As a Mastodon newbie, this has occurred to me too. I’d be happy to pay my instance host a few bucks a month to oil the wheels — much better than paying Elon $8 for a blue tick (not that I’d ever do that)!
This is probably a question more appropriate for @Gargron and/or @cwebber probably, but I wonder if there would be a way to reduce the bandwidth and CPU usage? Is this a protocol issue or an implementation issue?
Not to mean any disrespect but 21K is a very normal sized celeb account on Twitter. I wonder what Pleroma under similar load would look like. I saw that social.kernel.org chose Pleroma instead of Mastodon.
Not knowing anything about the back end of a mastodon server and how it scales, what's the impact on server load when you go from, say, 20k followers to 200k to 2M?
As the fediverse scales up, are we looking at a world where it's fair to ask the users with the biggest followers to shoulder more of the hosting costs?
From my understanding is it would increase your database usage mostly. Bandwidth would spike too I suppose depending on how much talk you get from the servers.
What type of hosting are you using?
As an instance operator, I decided to offload objects to S3/Cloudfront and Email to SES (mostly to avoid dealing with emails getting flagged as spam).
RSS 19.6GB! I've been watching this value on my server as we hit RAM limits recently. The docs say, "Typically a Sidekiq process will start at some relatively small value and reach some steady state value where RAM usage remains flat. If your RSS never stops growing, that can indicate you have a memory leak somewhere!" I wonder, did yours slowly grow to almost 20GB?
I was just trying to get a handle on where the costs were for your plan. Media storage would normally be the killer, I would have thought, if hosting stuff for others. But if it's just 'busy' because of all your users I guess there's lots of network traffic.
I just thought it a lot of money given the costs of a small OVH VPS self host sort of approach which is less than £5 a month (40Gb storage and unlimited traffic).
my instance with ~40 people is pushing about a 1/4 yours is. I’m hosting on a dedicated box from Hetzner and so it’s quite affordable (16core/64GB RAM) and only currently seeing 20% memory usage and 4% processor usage averaged over 24 hours.
Some historical perspective: back in 1998 I had a popular personal website that got 100,000 visitors a month, mostly static content, and it cost me several hundred dollars/month (plus hardware costs in the tens of thousands) to host (I ended up getting a full rack/10megabit feed with about 7 4U servers and then 2 Sun 1U's). The fact that this is even possible now for €50/month is a massive improvement.
I wasn't aware of that Sidekiq dashboard URL, thanks for the tip! My single user self-hosted instance has gone from around 2,500 daily jobs processed to almost 9,000 in the past 2 weeks! My Raspberry Pi 4 seems to be keeping up alright so far, but definitely something to keep an eye on.
I wonder, when hosting an instance becomes something for the people who can afford it, what that will mean for the diversity on the platform(s) long term.
It's very Mastodon-y that this popular account is a White Elephant: "A possession that its owner cannot dispose of, and whose cost, particularly that of maintenance, is out of proportion to its usefulness." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_el…
what are the specs of your instance and which provider do you use? I only started a couple of days ago with a 2 cores, 8GB of RAM of cloud server from #hetzner that costs around 12€/mo (plus Wasabi $5.99/mo for the media storage)
I have no idea why but the idea that self-hosting mastodon for one person would ever cost that much a month is insane to me. It is crazy to think about how many resources we use for everyday activities
OVH and Hetzner offer very affordable baremetal servers with unlimited bandwidth, so you would pay much less for much more power. Vultr has some too, but they aren't cheap. IONOS has some, but network is sometimes unreliable. So far, OVH and Hetzner ate the way to go if you want to scale up.
Thanks a bunch for posting this. I was wondering how the single-user instance scaling would work out.
I've been wondering about the single-user vs multi-user instance question from a performance standpoint ever since I read your arguments for smaller instances.
I seems I will have to read the ActivityPub spec at some point.
I've worked with musicians and large companies who I could imagine would just want to pony up for a "VIP instance" to ensure they can still reach their audience—but does that even exist as a turnkey service? (It reminds me of setting up client websites in the 90s, where you just had to know someone with a mostly-reliable server rack and hope things worked out!)
If 21K people follow you, odds are you can monetise that to an extent. (And I have the feeling most people who would attract that kind of following wouldn't be averse to monetisation.)
I guess popular peeps like you will have to monetize their popularity to pay for their instances :) or... someone can create a paid instance for celebs and other very popular peeps.
@aral, thanks, good to know! I think much of the cloud hosting costs are artificially inflated, and it's easier to control the costs with self-hosted hardware anyhow.
But then how can this scale? I was thinking of having my own instance, but if it costs that much to host for me just to follow others and have them follow me, it doesn't seem like it's worth it. I don't try and monetize my social media really.
I really like the perspective here. It's not all that different than using someone else's file storage/email vs your own. There is always a cost it's either your money or you as the product.
would you be willing to share the changes over time? I have mixed feelings between thinking it should be more vs less than €50/mo based on my experience with hosting.
Couldn't you have this running on your residential Internet connection? Server under the desk, domain, dynamic DNS?
What's the big deal about having 20,000 followers? If you're the only user on your own node and you Toot to 20,000 followers, doesn't it work similarly to a multi-cast, sending only a tiny amount of traffic to the peer nodes? Surely your node doesn't sit there looping from 0 to 19999, sending a separate toot to every follower.
thought about this some more and i think following a lot of people is more costly than having a lot of followers. so in your case that 4k follows are what add the most to your costs imo. unless greta follows everyone back (or posts once every second) i don't think she'd be much of a problem
The expense/work is more about how many instances you are pushing to, right? Now that you are connected to lots of instances, your instance presumably wouldn’t notice a hundred+ people with fewer followers. (I think?)
Is that actually a good idea? Intuitively I think creating an instance just for me would be a heavier burdon on the network than just joining an existing instance?
One of my first thoughts was to find out how much my use of the system costs the maintainers, then kick back 7-10x of that to do more than just defray costs. Not everyone is in a position to pay, plus turnover, expansion, and resiliency isn't free but nor is it easily factored into costs. I don't know how a system is sustainable without being up front about its costs and needs.
Sure, #Mastodon is growing very popular but it is by far one of the the less efficient and optimized #Fediverse softwares… it is written in #Ruby, whose benckmarks score very low.
Yes, running single-user instances of Mastodon is resource-intensive.
I don't think hosting costs scale with followers though. My single-person instance with 1500 accounts has tripled its followers in a week and it's comfortably within the resources available to it with 25 €/month of expenses. Load has barely changed. respublicae.eu/@praetor/109295…
Moderation and other #MastoAdmin costs however scale with the number of eyeballs, I suppose.
@nemobis To me the most urgent question is that of (useless) storage consumption. Having started my instance-of-one a little over a week ago and I already collected 10 GB out of the 20 GB @mastohost is providing in his baseplan. It‘s nuts. How do you guys handle that? I thought having 20 GB of storage for myself should work just fine - at least for a longer period of time and not only for two weeks. Or do I miss out on something? Thanks.
I think @fiftyfourpark is referring to Media storage. You are probably referring to 20 GB is Database storage. Media is on your end (remember?) and I am pretty sure you are over 20 GB :) @nemobis
@fiftyfourpark @nemobis @mastohost I hear that the Mastodon 4 release will let you control how long you cache the remote media. I guess reducing that will help. The client could do the caching
Don't even start to think about energy consumption. At @BUNDjugend_ak_digi we where asking around if somebody got into comparing different software like Pleroma vs. Mastodon to see which one would be more sustainable but I guess somebody still has to do the proper research for that and we didn't have the capacity to do it, unfortunately.
Thank you for the awesome detailed article. Is there a place to see performance statistics for numbers of followers on the instance and outside as well as number of people on the instance. What is the optimum numbers for performance purposes? Any data available? Thanks.
this protocol seems to have to be optimized. It is unsustainable and unscalable. I am a developer, in order to survive it should become more P2P like the old emule so everyone share the running costa on his own device
I considered Synapse to be less effective than Mastoson, but given that Synapse handles about 60 chat rooms and is federated to more than 500 servers, while only using 25 to 50% of the single core of my VPS and about 2GiB of memory, maybe it is more efficient. And it have strong consistency as well as E2E encryptions.
Molly White gives the talk "Is Web3 bullshit?" on the Crypto stage at Web Summit 2022 in Lisbon, Portugal on November 4, 2022.Most people have an opinion on ...
Here are my first Autism Infocards, Use them as you like within the Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). I'll make more cards soon, hope they are helpful 😊. There will be a download-link later on my website, when the set is complete! (Reupload because of typo and wrong order of the captions).
Warum „Open Source“ und die „Daten gehören mir“ gute Ideen sind: Twitter-Programmier plaudert aus dem Nähkastchen: ein Datenverkauf auf dem Detailgrad „User verlässt Haus, nutzt Verkehrsmittel A, betritt Arbeitsplatz, geht zu Geschäft von Konkurrent B, etc war konkret auf dem Tisch und wäre keine Verletzung der Twitter Nutzungsbedingungen gewesen.threadreaderapp.com/thread/158…
@stevekrenzel: With Twitter's change in ownership last week, I'm probably in the clear to talk about the most unethical thing I was asked to build while working at Twitter. 🧵 To set the stage, this was...…
Ve čtvrtek pořádáme v Praze #Fedora 37 (pre)release party. Ta se bude konat v Národní technické knihovně, která nebyla vybraná náhodně. Je tam totiž pravděpodobně největší nasazení Fedora Workstation v zemi. Pokud byste potom chtěli posedět na (pre)release afterparty, dejte nám vědět třeba formou komentáře pod pozvánkou: mojefedora.cz/fedora-37-prerel…
Stayed up way too late building isverified.online/ to help Twitter-verified journalists verify themselves to the public on their Mastodon profiles based on trusted people in the community who can vouch for them.
Currently it only has about a hundred folks that @WalterShaub painstakingly verified via Twitter DMs and other means.
@Tusky thanks for the great Android app! Is there something like this planned? I have found an issue on GitHub but it's quite stale. Unfortunately all the new messages in Tusky are loaded under the current position. This makes browsing the timeline unusable unfortunately.
when you get to the top you can reload by pulling down, and then scroll downwards. I realize that's not for everyone, but that's currently how we're doing it.
thanks for your quick reply! Unfortunately that doesn't work for me anymore as there are too many toots now and I like to read my timeline from old to new. Maybe there will be an option in the future, I hope. Thanks anyway!
I'll go first, I'm working on my first #novel The Ravenport Club, you can follow for updates on its Facebook page www.facebook.com/TheRavenportClub and very near to publishing it.
The interface looks slick and makes me excited for the future release! One thing I noticed on the page was the "Global Message Index" for conversations. Does this mean we could eventually support labels properly and not have multiple copies of an email downloaded in each folder? 🥺 I use Fastmail and stick with folders since TB doesn't handle it well. It would be insane to be able to use labels and TB together!
@gibwar Having a view built from tags/labels could be something to explore in the future yes. With a global index it's feasible to do. Since IMAP is built on folders, and we use folders for storage, it's more complex to figure out how to handle messages that are/would be in multiple folders.
thunderbird is amazing. Keep up the great work! I’d love to see more work on the search features particularly improving the indexing. Can you explain how the indexing is currently done and ways you might be working to make the index less likely to miss emails and also if you’re trying speed up searches?
If your private messages are not encrypted in-transit and at rest, they might not be as private as you think. Tutanota has you covered with encrypted email, contact lists, and calendar where and when you need it.😎 💪
WOWZERS! 😍 Check out all these people (names and usernames), who've contributed to LibreOffice projects since the start of November. They'll all get cool merch! And you can join them: blog.documentfoundation.org/bl…
Love LibreOffice? ❤️ You’re not alone – tens of millions of people use the software every day. And hundreds of people around the world collaborate to improve the suite, update its documentation and help to spread the word.
Nicolas Pettiaux
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