> Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive.
Sadly that's still an open issue that from time to time gets new input, but doesn't have a lot of traction. I feel like that's a big blind spot of Mastodon to this day and also basically forces people to stick to the largest instances that are less likely to go away, defeating the purpose of a distributed social network.
> More importantly, I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I'm really just not convinced social media is very useful. The main use I can see is very fast dispersal of information, but anything truly important will be distributed by mainstream media, and less important things will travel between small communities at a slower rate. So what are we left with exactly?
I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.
>I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.
I believe early on in the internet, there was more discussion of reputation systems like you see for eBay sellers.
Seems like this area hasn't advanced very much. You've got karma systems like on HN, and follow-count systems like on X or Instagram, but both of those arguably track "usage intensity" x "susceptibility to audience capture" more than "reputation".
Low-hanging fruit would be if X showed you the number of Community Notes a user has received. They aren't even bothering to do that.
Plus, just how exams only test you on how good you are at exams, those systems only show how good you are at getting likes, votes, followers, etc. You can have a billion followers, doesn't mean anything to me other than you're good at getting followers. Which now that I think about it, says enough.
I agree with the reputation part, but the reputation part has been a blocker to using mainstream media for me. I can think of lots of important things MSM misses or won't touch (oh and look who happens to be sponsors of this segment). Plus here we are sharing ideas on social media <3
The problem isn't social media, it's mass social media.
Oldschool forums are "social media". But they were usually much smaller than the current mass social media where an ad buy can get you in front of millions and millions of eyeballs in a hyper-targeted fashion.
I think the small community stuff is useful, even on the scale of HN, which is only small when you think about the regulars posting, which people recognize.
Now that we have functional distributed social networks, I want a system that abolishes power mods. Whatever technical solution gets us there. Give us spam filters, but let people self-organize. I don't give two fucking shits that some Tom, Dick, or Harry doesn't like a Bob if I want to hear what Bob has to say.
the problem is obviously, we can sorta filter out the bot spreading, but when people just use the avenue to spam whatever, it's a firehose only good for bullshit.
As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
Well that's kind of understandable, isn't it? In the USENET era, internet users were a subculture.
In 2026, almost everyone is an internet user.
It's kind of like saying "As someone whose first car was a Model T, I don't really consider the bulk of mainstream drivers today to be in any way 'my people'".
Exactly. If you were on USENET way back, you were a fucking nerd (lovingly). People romanticize that because it was very likely with any given group of people, they could strike up some kind of conversation, and they likely shared at least a few central values. Now the Internet is just outside with better moderation tools and curation.
I will say though the GP's comment:
> The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
That's just everybody, including them even if they refuse to admit it. I have fond memories of many a circus on USENET, on ICQ, on AOL chat rooms, on 4chan, on Digg, everything. They all have circuses with different sorts of clowns putting on different sorts of shows. But they're all equally value-free. Pretending otherwise is just wanking yourself.
Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.
I'm not old enough to have experienced Usenet. For those who remember Usenet: Do you believe that Eternal September was a failure of cultural transmission? Or was it more of a human capital thing? (Early adopters/academics tend to be better-behaved users?)
Another way of thinking about it: Suppose the exact same userbase had joined Usenet, but they trickled in gradually instead of flooding in all at once. How much would that have changed the outcome?
FWIW I used to think it was human capital, but have updated more towards cultural explanations. For example, it seems fairly common for academics to make fools of themselves online nowadays.
I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but Eternal September was abrupt. To a degree there was an echo of it (not on USENET, but on forums and other places) with the advent of the smartphone in 2007, and another with the mass take-up of Internet services in 2016 on the Indian subcontinent by a huge population.
In fact, the people I see during my walk out are more my people than those I meet on the Internet. They speak my language, are immersed in my culture, and find local neighbourhood problems very relevant.
Then I go online, and there's a high likelihood I encounter people from other countries; worse is when you don't even enjoy a little bit of multiculturalism, but all you experience is a majority of people from one country which isn't even yours - like being on this site or Reddit or Twitter and being bombarded by the US perspective of US matters.
It's easy for terminally online people like me to forget who even are your people.
I don't see this happening, but I really wish that the Mastodon model centered on joining your city's local Mastodon server. Your server is centered on local people and local conversations. Maybe one would find this local community sort of annoying, but it would be at relevant, at least some of the time.
From there, you can connect with other individuals on other servers with similar interests or whatever. But your online identity would be rooted to where you actually live.
Time to move to a new city? You just migrate to a new Mastodon server. Makes sense.
As it stands now, Mastodon servers are primarily centered on some kind of shared interest, but I don't think that makes much sense. I am a person with many interests, so which do I pick? Over time, I might gradually lose interest in a subject, or simply prioritize something else. Do I leave that old server? It seems like a hassle to move, but it seems weird to stay. The result is that Mastodon servers seem so arbitrary, when they should be really important.
Other servers could still exist for the misfits or for people who otherwise find their city's server objectionable. But I think a city being the "default" option would make a lot of sense.
What makes sense about selecting instances based on one's own location?
Using local infrastructure leaks your location and simplifies law enforcement against the user. For example: Living in Saudi Arabia for work would absolutely not inspire me to seek out a hypothetical Saudi Social.
If local reddit communities are any tell, you would see competition real fast, e.g. Littletown Social, realLittleTown, LittleTown Online ...
Instead, one should probably use the server that aligns best with ones idea of moderation and appears somewhat trustworthy not to go down tomorrow.
> There’s also the financial side. I’m very grateful to everyone who donated, but donations haven’t covered costs for a long time. I’ve had to shoulder most of the expenses, time, and responsibility myself.
One of the main issues of running a federated Mastodon instance with little to no money and donations will not cut it.
I picked the only instance I know that actually charges its users an insignificant amount ($20/year), thinking it'd give me some sense of security that it won't just go away one day. I've been paying for it for 3 years in a row without a second thought about it.
Anyways, on Aug 1st their pricing is increasing to $50/year (150% increase!) and now I'm far less convinced that the value it offers is worth the money.
$20/year being considered an insignificant cost for a social media account just shows how inefficient Mastodon is. That's already mode than half the cost of a cheap VPS that should be enough to host a couple of users.
This is why I host a personal instance. The overheard for moderation and costs is much lower. It also means if I tire of this, migrating my content is easier.
Nostr is just Mastodon or IRC with automatic multiposting.
Users must selfhost data for decentralized socials to work. One big problem with running a Twitter-like social media, Twitter itself included, is that hosting UGC is just risk without rewards. Users don't pay for the bandwidth, advertisers don't like competing quality UGC(they're possibly even angry about social media that it keeps undermining their "creatives" investment), just no one pays for it.
So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost. "First, connect to your spare Pi with a global IPv4 address" is out of question. Multihop P2P likely won't work either.
"So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost."
You might be interested in Holos: "Holos turns your phone or computer into a full ActivityPub server. No big-tech hosting, no middleman reading your posts. A relay keeps your identity online 24/7 while your device stays in your pocket."
That's close to what I had in mind, but relay architecture is not enough; people will "abuse" the relays, and relay server operators will find it uncomfortable. Relays shouldn't be hosting content at all.
I personally would never give a mastodon community to a random individual if I had to step away. This is problematic on a privacy and operation level, not to mention the time it would take to interview people. Which means that if I didn't already have a second-in-command, the community would be shut down.
If it were a forum, then asking long-term contributors and moderators if they're interested in taking over is certainly an option. But it's not, there's likely no natural "hierarchy" that develops on a mastodon instance.
They could conceivably ask another established instance if they'd like to take over the old domain, though.
The tech is nice but sadly there's still not that many interesting accounts or content there unless you really want to read about Nostr and zaps all day.
I've tried many times, there's decent apps too these days (Primal) but unless you are heavily into that topic or crypto it's not very interesting.
he's taking his ball and going home, the financial aspect isn't load bearing (god damn claude ruined this) in his decision, it's a rationalization. if it were significant, he wouldn't refuse to hand it over to someone who still wants to do it.
A social media site isn't like a free software project. People are trusting you in a way that you cannot just hand over to another entity. (It's more like a SaaS business, in that way.) Some instances have managed it, but only to trusted community members, and never (to my knowledge) without some degree of strife.
That's a shame. It seems to me that we are in a frustrating situation where there are probably clever ways to solve the problems created by social media. But because launching new social platforms requires solving a difficult chicken-and-egg problem, we don't get very many chances to try anything new or innovative.
Another way of putting it is: Occasionally people will speculate about ways to fix issues with Twitter, reddit, etc. Such speculation feels fairly pointless, because there is little evidence that the moderators of those platforms are listening to suggestions, or even care about anything besides profit maximization. Without much demand for improvement ideas, the supply of such ideas tends to dry up as well.
If anyone else is in this situation of desiring to sunset a social platform, I would encourage them to run a contest. People can enter your contest by submitting plans for how to revitalize the platform / a genuinely new direction for social media. You judge the entries, pick a winner, and the winner takes over administration of your platform so they can try out their proposed new direction.
> If anyone else is in this situation of desiring to sunset a social platform
I feel like once you arrive at the situation where you want to free up your time and shut down a project (Which is already a hard decision to arrive at) you'll not want to put in extra work to run some contest, pick a winner, hand over domains, infra or figure out a way forward.
It already takes me a lot of energy to shut down side projects with little to no users instead of just keep paying for it.
ActivityPub is the protocol and its the basis of the "fediverse". It's what underlies Meta's Threads, PeerTube (youtube alternative), Pixelfed (instagram alt), Lemmy (reddit alt), Nextcloud, and probably even Trump's TruthSocial! There's even a Wordpress and Ghost plugin to integrate into ActivityPub. Even Bluesky has previously discussed integrating with it
>Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive
I'm sure there is some technical excuse to why this is the case but just seems entirely broken that it can't just have the owner of the account provably broadcast they control both the original and the destinations and to redirect all posts.
I mean the actual thing that has value IS the posts and there would be less burden on people shutting down these servers if you were not destroying that work by doing so.
When a host goes away, where do you propose the posts previously hosted there now get hosted?
One option is for the poster's new host to have all the old posts uploaded ... how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated?
I'd genuinely be interested to hear your suggestions for how these technical issues could be resolved.
How about this: Duplicates of the old posts are created on a new host using some import/export mechanic, but they also contain a cryptographic signature proving ownership of the old posts (utilizing some secret only the original poster would have access to).
When a reference to a post becomes invalid because it's underlying host is gone, the other host holding those references tries to find new duplicate posts with the correct signature, and if it finds them, updates the broken old references to point to these new duplicates. If it doesn't find any duplicates with a matching signature, it leaves the references broken and has some cooldown before it tries to fix them again.
Like usual, the Mastodon people have the least understanding of how federation actually works.
When a server stops federating, the federated posts still exist in the DB of all the remote instances that recieved it. They're still indexed and searchable from there. You could move those posts into the DB of a new server, but they'll still "originate" from the old one. But you can carry on and interact with old threads.
There's no real foolproof mechanism for updating posts, although there is an AP Update activity, much like deletes there's nothing forcing an instance to respect it.
Considering the system has a way to federate a server self destructing telling other servers to delete its posts could a similar system not just tell other servers to update their URL for that users posts.
Not pretending to know anything about the system feel free to point out why this wouldn't work. I'm just approaching it from a user perspective that having to lose posts to move server is bad for users and having to choose to nuke all posts in the case of shutting down a server is bad for admins.
> how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated?
You have outlined two scenarios. One where the old posts are deleted, and in the old posts are moved to the new host.
In the former case, the "referencing posts" start pointing to 404. Maybe in the latter case, we can also just have the referencing posts also point to 404.
A partial solution is better than a full solution.
> I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I can't figure out if this is me or if things really have changed. I was on early Reddit (before there were comments) and HN. There were always jerks and flamewars and pedants but it just feels like any thread I read on HN or Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal. I've watched long-time members of HN die and I can only think: do I really want to spend most of my life (or a good portion) doing this? It seems so empty.
What do people even get out of this? Is life this boring that people find it entertaining? I just don't get it anymore and I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted. I don't get any enjoyment out of it anymore and I feel like something is wrong with me because others do (only barely, this is insanity that we've adapted to).
2005 me thought things were going to be a lot more interesting, but things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space. (HN is social media - just trolling, the arguments of this are funny). There's gotta be something better. Do people even want better communities, would they recognize them, or is this the new normal? Is the optimism of 2005 dead, impossible to resurrect?
I agree. I think part of the problem is how recommendation algorithms have conditioned people to act online. Recommendation algorithms optimize for overall platform engagement to increase revenue, which tends to reward anti-social behavior like flamewars, conflict, ragebait, etc. It's rewarded simply because it creates more engagement than more positive content. Users in turn are conditioned to these algorithms because their anti-social behavior gets rewarded in the form of favorable algorithmic treatment. Now, I feel like the average social media user is just predisposed to act in those negative ways, which is why it's prevalent even on HN where the recommendation algorithms are not tuned in quite the same way.
Those forces weren't present on early social media, and have only gotten worse over time.
Over its course the Internet and Web took over just about all communications, including culturally anchoring things like TV, radio, and newspapers. The takeover accelerated with the rise of broadband, Facebook and smartphones, and is nearly complete. The whole world's here.
This means people who want to advertise, influence, or control large numbers of people also followed.
On my Instagram, sometimes I'll see local news, and the fake accounts are very obvious, they all post practically the same thing and all of their profiles follow similar patterns. Maybe this will go away when everything becomes ID-gated.
The optimism of 2005 was pre-smartphone, pre-social-media, and well before everyone's grandparents were constantly regurgitating political posts on Facebook.
> Do people even want better communities
Most people do not want to put in the work to make them, but they'll certainly join and passively let people run themselves into the ground entertaining them for free. It doesn't make sense to do all the work for lazy people unless you're just wanting to broadcast to the largest audience possible.
> Is life this boring that people find it entertaining?
I don’t think it has to do with boredom or entertainment. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do push you into addictive behaviour on purpose, but I do think even HN (inadvertently) has addictive properties.
> I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted.
Pretty sure it’s the vibe. Plus, whatever we’re doing here is not really connecting with other people, it’s more akin to shouting at each other across a void. I do still frequent one old-style forum, and there I do see some connection between the regulars.
> things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space.
Once money became a factor, it was only a matter of time. Just the other day I was also thinking how I can’t even stand podcasts anymore, and all the ads are a major factor. Seems like every podcast is part of a network and it’s all about money. No one is just having fun anymore.
People who post on the internet are outliers, something like 98% of message board users lurk, can't remember who said it but someone summed it up as "everyone you talk to online is crazy". The reality is life is boring a lot of the time and I've always seen online interaction not as a substitute for social life but with no expectation. Sometimes you get good conversations, often you don't.
There is more negativity in terms of volume which has a quality of its own because it seeps more into real life than in it used to, but honestly some conversations in the olden days were worse.
One way to think of it is a sort of multiplayer iterated prisoner's dilemma. If players generally cooperate, cooperating is the best strategy. If players generally defect, defecting is the best strategy. Over time you can get a death spiral (loss of social capital) where people defect more, which leads to more defections. You can also get selection effects where people who enjoy conflict stay, and people who dislike conflict leave.
The medium is the message. Certain specific features, such as the retweet-with-comment feature, incentivize starting fights. Older platforms didn't feature likes/retweets as prominently. Newer platforms are constantly giving you numerical scores, which leads to competitive socialization and status-seeking. Some people are into that sort of thing. And to be fair, clout is objectively valuable in certain ways.
> Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal.
Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).
Eventually normal-adjacent people took over the site, which caused a boon of interesting topics and diverse opinions for a long while. The rude-to-be-funny thing never quite stopped, but when it went too far it was moderated or downvoted away.
I'd agree that things have been going downhill for many years now. The peak of genuine and quality engagement is long behind us. LLM-assisted comments are certainly not helping (I'm not talking about bots, I mean people who direct LLMs to write their comments).
>Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).
EDIT: Once the server disappears, users who did nothing will lose the ability to delete their accounts later.
Without self-destruct, remote servers may retain cached profiles and posts indefinitely, but the original users will no longer control those objects. Mastodon created the command specifically to broadcast account deletions before a permanent shutdown and leave little cached material behind.
Is this desirable? This wipes other people's copies of their boosts, favourites, and bookmarked posts. If users want this behaviour, they can delete their own accounts.
It's possible to contact the instances who retain the copies of the data, and have them delete it. It's not like the Fediverse is some kind of blockchain, where data is replicated forever unless authorised parties delete it. (And deletion requests can still be sent out by whoever controls the domain, after the instance is gone.)
(to be clear, i have been on mastodon/fedi for coming up on a decade now and have no qualms about the way leaving or sunsetting an instance works. part of the magic imo is that old posts from long-dead instances regularly go around again)
how exactly do you propose someone looking to delete all of their old posts from a dead instance might obtain the exhaustive list of instances that have historically received their posts via a long indirect cascade of boosts to send these formal or informal deletion requests? an allowlist-federated instance obviously makes that far more tractable, and otherwise I could potentially see annoying paths to doing it anyway if i had been the admin and had every log ever sitting somewhere to trawl through, but in the case of a normal user whose instance is already gone and who doesn't have an ongoing relationship with the prior admin, this is hardly a realistic way to address that concern.
Obtaining the exhaustive list of instances is very difficult, but typing your old handle into the search box of the ten largest Mastodon instances will get you many leads. Aiming for an exhaustive list is somewhat security theatre: chances are, many of your Fedi posts are in Common Crawl, which the instance sending DELETE wouldn't affect – and good luck redacting Common Crawl. Fedi is not a secret medium. (This is not to say that the maximalist "if it's technically possible, I have a right to do it!" position is anything other than a huge violation of privacy.)
> Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive.
Sadly that's still an open issue that from time to time gets new input, but doesn't have a lot of traction. I feel like that's a big blind spot of Mastodon to this day and also basically forces people to stick to the largest instances that are less likely to go away, defeating the purpose of a distributed social network.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
There's this if you want an automated way to download and repost your content: https://mastodoncontentmover.github.io/
It's also a source of power for mods.
I always feel like stuff like this is more or less intentional. Projects make their priorities known based on the priorities of their work.
> More importantly, I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I'm really just not convinced social media is very useful. The main use I can see is very fast dispersal of information, but anything truly important will be distributed by mainstream media, and less important things will travel between small communities at a slower rate. So what are we left with exactly?
I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.
>I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.
I believe early on in the internet, there was more discussion of reputation systems like you see for eBay sellers.
Seems like this area hasn't advanced very much. You've got karma systems like on HN, and follow-count systems like on X or Instagram, but both of those arguably track "usage intensity" x "susceptibility to audience capture" more than "reputation".
Low-hanging fruit would be if X showed you the number of Community Notes a user has received. They aren't even bothering to do that.
Plus, just how exams only test you on how good you are at exams, those systems only show how good you are at getting likes, votes, followers, etc. You can have a billion followers, doesn't mean anything to me other than you're good at getting followers. Which now that I think about it, says enough.
I agree with the reputation part, but the reputation part has been a blocker to using mainstream media for me. I can think of lots of important things MSM misses or won't touch (oh and look who happens to be sponsors of this segment). Plus here we are sharing ideas on social media <3
What you are highlighting is the thing social media has issues with--trust.
The problem isn't social media, it's mass social media.
Oldschool forums are "social media". But they were usually much smaller than the current mass social media where an ad buy can get you in front of millions and millions of eyeballs in a hyper-targeted fashion.
I think the small community stuff is useful, even on the scale of HN, which is only small when you think about the regulars posting, which people recognize.
Now that we have functional distributed social networks, I want a system that abolishes power mods. Whatever technical solution gets us there. Give us spam filters, but let people self-organize. I don't give two fucking shits that some Tom, Dick, or Harry doesn't like a Bob if I want to hear what Bob has to say.
the problem is obviously, we can sorta filter out the bot spreading, but when people just use the avenue to spam whatever, it's a firehose only good for bullshit.
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As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
Well that's kind of understandable, isn't it? In the USENET era, internet users were a subculture.
In 2026, almost everyone is an internet user.
It's kind of like saying "As someone whose first car was a Model T, I don't really consider the bulk of mainstream drivers today to be in any way 'my people'".
Exactly. If you were on USENET way back, you were a fucking nerd (lovingly). People romanticize that because it was very likely with any given group of people, they could strike up some kind of conversation, and they likely shared at least a few central values. Now the Internet is just outside with better moderation tools and curation.
I will say though the GP's comment:
> The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
That's just everybody, including them even if they refuse to admit it. I have fond memories of many a circus on USENET, on ICQ, on AOL chat rooms, on 4chan, on Digg, everything. They all have circuses with different sorts of clowns putting on different sorts of shows. But they're all equally value-free. Pretending otherwise is just wanking yourself.
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Selective newsgroups vs the firehose/feed/timeline of modern platforms who generally do not want you to tightly discriminate according to your tastes/interest.
Today is the 12021th of September 1993.
I'm not old enough to have experienced Usenet. For those who remember Usenet: Do you believe that Eternal September was a failure of cultural transmission? Or was it more of a human capital thing? (Early adopters/academics tend to be better-behaved users?)
Another way of thinking about it: Suppose the exact same userbase had joined Usenet, but they trickled in gradually instead of flooding in all at once. How much would that have changed the outcome?
FWIW I used to think it was human capital, but have updated more towards cultural explanations. For example, it seems fairly common for academics to make fools of themselves online nowadays.
I think it was the rate of change. Previous waves were small by comparison and had been absorbed/integrated after a period, with a degree of gradual change. Nothing is forever, but Eternal September was abrupt. To a degree there was an echo of it (not on USENET, but on forums and other places) with the advent of the smartphone in 2007, and another with the mass take-up of Internet services in 2016 on the Indian subcontinent by a huge population.
touché
that's because mainstream internet users today are everyone... I don't go for a walk and expect the world to be filled with "my people" either.
In fact, the people I see during my walk out are more my people than those I meet on the Internet. They speak my language, are immersed in my culture, and find local neighbourhood problems very relevant.
Then I go online, and there's a high likelihood I encounter people from other countries; worse is when you don't even enjoy a little bit of multiculturalism, but all you experience is a majority of people from one country which isn't even yours - like being on this site or Reddit or Twitter and being bombarded by the US perspective of US matters.
It's easy for terminally online people like me to forget who even are your people.
I don't see this happening, but I really wish that the Mastodon model centered on joining your city's local Mastodon server. Your server is centered on local people and local conversations. Maybe one would find this local community sort of annoying, but it would be at relevant, at least some of the time.
From there, you can connect with other individuals on other servers with similar interests or whatever. But your online identity would be rooted to where you actually live.
Time to move to a new city? You just migrate to a new Mastodon server. Makes sense.
As it stands now, Mastodon servers are primarily centered on some kind of shared interest, but I don't think that makes much sense. I am a person with many interests, so which do I pick? Over time, I might gradually lose interest in a subject, or simply prioritize something else. Do I leave that old server? It seems like a hassle to move, but it seems weird to stay. The result is that Mastodon servers seem so arbitrary, when they should be really important.
Other servers could still exist for the misfits or for people who otherwise find their city's server objectionable. But I think a city being the "default" option would make a lot of sense.
What makes sense about selecting instances based on one's own location?
Using local infrastructure leaks your location and simplifies law enforcement against the user. For example: Living in Saudi Arabia for work would absolutely not inspire me to seek out a hypothetical Saudi Social.
If local reddit communities are any tell, you would see competition real fast, e.g. Littletown Social, realLittleTown, LittleTown Online ...
Instead, one should probably use the server that aligns best with ones idea of moderation and appears somewhat trustworthy not to go down tomorrow.
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My exact experience:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49067097
> There’s also the financial side. I’m very grateful to everyone who donated, but donations haven’t covered costs for a long time. I’ve had to shoulder most of the expenses, time, and responsibility myself.
One of the main issues of running a federated Mastodon instance with little to no money and donations will not cut it.
I picked the only instance I know that actually charges its users an insignificant amount ($20/year), thinking it'd give me some sense of security that it won't just go away one day. I've been paying for it for 3 years in a row without a second thought about it.
Anyways, on Aug 1st their pricing is increasing to $50/year (150% increase!) and now I'm far less convinced that the value it offers is worth the money.
$20/year being considered an insignificant cost for a social media account just shows how inefficient Mastodon is. That's already mode than half the cost of a cheap VPS that should be enough to host a couple of users.
This is why I host a personal instance. The overheard for moderation and costs is much lower. It also means if I tire of this, migrating my content is easier.
this is why nostr beats mastodon. when the operator pitches a fit and shuts down, your community survives.
Nostr is just Mastodon or IRC with automatic multiposting.
Users must selfhost data for decentralized socials to work. One big problem with running a Twitter-like social media, Twitter itself included, is that hosting UGC is just risk without rewards. Users don't pay for the bandwidth, advertisers don't like competing quality UGC(they're possibly even angry about social media that it keeps undermining their "creatives" investment), just no one pays for it.
So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost. "First, connect to your spare Pi with a global IPv4 address" is out of question. Multihop P2P likely won't work either.
"So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost."
You might be interested in Holos: "Holos turns your phone or computer into a full ActivityPub server. No big-tech hosting, no middleman reading your posts. A relay keeps your identity online 24/7 while your device stays in your pocket."
https://holos.social/
That's close to what I had in mind, but relay architecture is not enough; people will "abuse" the relays, and relay server operators will find it uncomfortable. Relays shouldn't be hosting content at all.
The author doesn't sound like they are pitching a fit to me.
maybe i read more into it. i got put off by his refusal to hand it off. he can quit, no qualms there. but not handing it over? that seems petty, imo.
I personally would never give a mastodon community to a random individual if I had to step away. This is problematic on a privacy and operation level, not to mention the time it would take to interview people. Which means that if I didn't already have a second-in-command, the community would be shut down.
If it were a forum, then asking long-term contributors and moderators if they're interested in taking over is certainly an option. But it's not, there's likely no natural "hierarchy" that develops on a mastodon instance.
They could conceivably ask another established instance if they'd like to take over the old domain, though.
When mastodon.technology shut down, the operator commented on this, see "Why Not Transfer to a New Admin?" here -- https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/
The tech is nice but sadly there's still not that many interesting accounts or content there unless you really want to read about Nostr and zaps all day.
I've tried many times, there's decent apps too these days (Primal) but unless you are heavily into that topic or crypto it's not very interesting.
I feel like if you can ignore the bitcoin-bros, Nostr is a better, more lightweight design that doesn't suffer from centralized (localized) shutdowns.
he's taking his ball and going home, the financial aspect isn't load bearing (god damn claude ruined this) in his decision, it's a rationalization. if it were significant, he wouldn't refuse to hand it over to someone who still wants to do it.
A social media site isn't like a free software project. People are trusting you in a way that you cannot just hand over to another entity. (It's more like a SaaS business, in that way.) Some instances have managed it, but only to trusted community members, and never (to my knowledge) without some degree of strife.
> People are trusting you in a way that you cannot just hand over to another entity.
Same goes for a free software project actually.
See the W3C Linked Web Storage (LWS) work on what could be apropos data ownership and transfers.
https://www.w3.org/groups/wg/lws/publications/
>the server won’t be handed over to anyone else.
That's a shame. It seems to me that we are in a frustrating situation where there are probably clever ways to solve the problems created by social media. But because launching new social platforms requires solving a difficult chicken-and-egg problem, we don't get very many chances to try anything new or innovative.
Another way of putting it is: Occasionally people will speculate about ways to fix issues with Twitter, reddit, etc. Such speculation feels fairly pointless, because there is little evidence that the moderators of those platforms are listening to suggestions, or even care about anything besides profit maximization. Without much demand for improvement ideas, the supply of such ideas tends to dry up as well.
If anyone else is in this situation of desiring to sunset a social platform, I would encourage them to run a contest. People can enter your contest by submitting plans for how to revitalize the platform / a genuinely new direction for social media. You judge the entries, pick a winner, and the winner takes over administration of your platform so they can try out their proposed new direction.
> If anyone else is in this situation of desiring to sunset a social platform
I feel like once you arrive at the situation where you want to free up your time and shut down a project (Which is already a hard decision to arrive at) you'll not want to put in extra work to run some contest, pick a winner, hand over domains, infra or figure out a way forward.
It already takes me a lot of energy to shut down side projects with little to no users instead of just keep paying for it.
Fair enough. Maybe the threshold for doing as I suggest should be if you are just starting to lose enthusiasm.
No, not handing over the server to anyone is the only responsible thing to do when you don't have a successor that you can trust 100%.
Why is an untrustworthy successor worse than abandoning the service? Users can always voluntarily migrate elsewhere if the successor does a bad job.
Question: Is there some kind of official protocol for Mastodon?
Reason I ask, is if whoever is in charge have considered to support moving posts and interactions from one server to another.
The protocol is ActivityPub and the feature you suggest is being considered as FEP 1580.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/1580/...
The relevant issue for mastodon itself is https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
Yes, it's called ActivityPub. I'm surprised it doesn't support migrating posts.
ActivityPub is the protocol and its the basis of the "fediverse". It's what underlies Meta's Threads, PeerTube (youtube alternative), Pixelfed (instagram alt), Lemmy (reddit alt), Nextcloud, and probably even Trump's TruthSocial! There's even a Wordpress and Ghost plugin to integrate into ActivityPub. Even Bluesky has previously discussed integrating with it
>Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive
I'm sure there is some technical excuse to why this is the case but just seems entirely broken that it can't just have the owner of the account provably broadcast they control both the original and the destinations and to redirect all posts.
I mean the actual thing that has value IS the posts and there would be less burden on people shutting down these servers if you were not destroying that work by doing so.
The posts, when posted live on the host.
The user can download their posts.
When a host goes away, where do you propose the posts previously hosted there now get hosted?
One option is for the poster's new host to have all the old posts uploaded ... how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated?
I'd genuinely be interested to hear your suggestions for how these technical issues could be resolved.
How about this: Duplicates of the old posts are created on a new host using some import/export mechanic, but they also contain a cryptographic signature proving ownership of the old posts (utilizing some secret only the original poster would have access to).
When a reference to a post becomes invalid because it's underlying host is gone, the other host holding those references tries to find new duplicate posts with the correct signature, and if it finds them, updates the broken old references to point to these new duplicates. If it doesn't find any duplicates with a matching signature, it leaves the references broken and has some cooldown before it tries to fix them again.
Can we please do content addressing one day?
No because people like to change the content of what they consider the same post.
Like usual, the Mastodon people have the least understanding of how federation actually works.
When a server stops federating, the federated posts still exist in the DB of all the remote instances that recieved it. They're still indexed and searchable from there. You could move those posts into the DB of a new server, but they'll still "originate" from the old one. But you can carry on and interact with old threads.
There's no real foolproof mechanism for updating posts, although there is an AP Update activity, much like deletes there's nothing forcing an instance to respect it.
Considering the system has a way to federate a server self destructing telling other servers to delete its posts could a similar system not just tell other servers to update their URL for that users posts.
Not pretending to know anything about the system feel free to point out why this wouldn't work. I'm just approaching it from a user perspective that having to lose posts to move server is bad for users and having to choose to nuke all posts in the case of shutting down a server is bad for admins.
> how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated?
You have outlined two scenarios. One where the old posts are deleted, and in the old posts are moved to the new host.
In the former case, the "referencing posts" start pointing to 404. Maybe in the latter case, we can also just have the referencing posts also point to 404.
A partial solution is better than a full solution.
> I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I can't figure out if this is me or if things really have changed. I was on early Reddit (before there were comments) and HN. There were always jerks and flamewars and pedants but it just feels like any thread I read on HN or Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal. I've watched long-time members of HN die and I can only think: do I really want to spend most of my life (or a good portion) doing this? It seems so empty.
What do people even get out of this? Is life this boring that people find it entertaining? I just don't get it anymore and I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted. I don't get any enjoyment out of it anymore and I feel like something is wrong with me because others do (only barely, this is insanity that we've adapted to).
2005 me thought things were going to be a lot more interesting, but things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space. (HN is social media - just trolling, the arguments of this are funny). There's gotta be something better. Do people even want better communities, would they recognize them, or is this the new normal? Is the optimism of 2005 dead, impossible to resurrect?
I agree. I think part of the problem is how recommendation algorithms have conditioned people to act online. Recommendation algorithms optimize for overall platform engagement to increase revenue, which tends to reward anti-social behavior like flamewars, conflict, ragebait, etc. It's rewarded simply because it creates more engagement than more positive content. Users in turn are conditioned to these algorithms because their anti-social behavior gets rewarded in the form of favorable algorithmic treatment. Now, I feel like the average social media user is just predisposed to act in those negative ways, which is why it's prevalent even on HN where the recommendation algorithms are not tuned in quite the same way.
Those forces weren't present on early social media, and have only gotten worse over time.
I don't think it's you.
Over its course the Internet and Web took over just about all communications, including culturally anchoring things like TV, radio, and newspapers. The takeover accelerated with the rise of broadband, Facebook and smartphones, and is nearly complete. The whole world's here.
This means people who want to advertise, influence, or control large numbers of people also followed.
On my Instagram, sometimes I'll see local news, and the fake accounts are very obvious, they all post practically the same thing and all of their profiles follow similar patterns. Maybe this will go away when everything becomes ID-gated.
The optimism of 2005 was pre-smartphone, pre-social-media, and well before everyone's grandparents were constantly regurgitating political posts on Facebook.
> Do people even want better communities
Most people do not want to put in the work to make them, but they'll certainly join and passively let people run themselves into the ground entertaining them for free. It doesn't make sense to do all the work for lazy people unless you're just wanting to broadcast to the largest audience possible.
You’re not alone. Plenty of us feel the same way.
> Is life this boring that people find it entertaining?
I don’t think it has to do with boredom or entertainment. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do push you into addictive behaviour on purpose, but I do think even HN (inadvertently) has addictive properties.
> I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted.
Pretty sure it’s the vibe. Plus, whatever we’re doing here is not really connecting with other people, it’s more akin to shouting at each other across a void. I do still frequent one old-style forum, and there I do see some connection between the regulars.
> things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space.
Once money became a factor, it was only a matter of time. Just the other day I was also thinking how I can’t even stand podcasts anymore, and all the ads are a major factor. Seems like every podcast is part of a network and it’s all about money. No one is just having fun anymore.
> There's gotta be something better.
There is. It’s friends offline.
I do think this has always been the case, Jerry Pournelle funnily enough made a very similar observation back in 1986 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaming_(Internet_term)#Histor....)
People who post on the internet are outliers, something like 98% of message board users lurk, can't remember who said it but someone summed it up as "everyone you talk to online is crazy". The reality is life is boring a lot of the time and I've always seen online interaction not as a substitute for social life but with no expectation. Sometimes you get good conversations, often you don't.
There is more negativity in terms of volume which has a quality of its own because it seeps more into real life than in it used to, but honestly some conversations in the olden days were worse.
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
One way to think of it is a sort of multiplayer iterated prisoner's dilemma. If players generally cooperate, cooperating is the best strategy. If players generally defect, defecting is the best strategy. Over time you can get a death spiral (loss of social capital) where people defect more, which leads to more defections. You can also get selection effects where people who enjoy conflict stay, and people who dislike conflict leave.
The medium is the message. Certain specific features, such as the retweet-with-comment feature, incentivize starting fights. Older platforms didn't feature likes/retweets as prominently. Newer platforms are constantly giving you numerical scores, which leads to competitive socialization and status-seeking. Some people are into that sort of thing. And to be fair, clout is objectively valuable in certain ways.
People take example from their political and cultural (artists, sportspersons) leaders.
> Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal.
Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).
Eventually normal-adjacent people took over the site, which caused a boon of interesting topics and diverse opinions for a long while. The rude-to-be-funny thing never quite stopped, but when it went too far it was moderated or downvoted away.
I'd agree that things have been going downhill for many years now. The peak of genuine and quality engagement is long behind us. LLM-assisted comments are certainly not helping (I'm not talking about bots, I mean people who direct LLMs to write their comments).
>Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).
Reddit was rather similar to HN in the earliest days: https://web.archive.org/web/20060415194256/http://www.reddit...
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don't forget to `tootctl self-destruct`
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/tootctl/#self-destruct
EDIT: Once the server disappears, users who did nothing will lose the ability to delete their accounts later.
Without self-destruct, remote servers may retain cached profiles and posts indefinitely, but the original users will no longer control those objects. Mastodon created the command specifically to broadcast account deletions before a permanent shutdown and leave little cached material behind.
Is this desirable? This wipes other people's copies of their boosts, favourites, and bookmarked posts. If users want this behaviour, they can delete their own accounts.
They can't delete their accounts after the server hosting the account shuts down.
It's possible to contact the instances who retain the copies of the data, and have them delete it. It's not like the Fediverse is some kind of blockchain, where data is replicated forever unless authorised parties delete it. (And deletion requests can still be sent out by whoever controls the domain, after the instance is gone.)
(to be clear, i have been on mastodon/fedi for coming up on a decade now and have no qualms about the way leaving or sunsetting an instance works. part of the magic imo is that old posts from long-dead instances regularly go around again)
how exactly do you propose someone looking to delete all of their old posts from a dead instance might obtain the exhaustive list of instances that have historically received their posts via a long indirect cascade of boosts to send these formal or informal deletion requests? an allowlist-federated instance obviously makes that far more tractable, and otherwise I could potentially see annoying paths to doing it anyway if i had been the admin and had every log ever sitting somewhere to trawl through, but in the case of a normal user whose instance is already gone and who doesn't have an ongoing relationship with the prior admin, this is hardly a realistic way to address that concern.
Obtaining the exhaustive list of instances is very difficult, but typing your old handle into the search box of the ten largest Mastodon instances will get you many leads. Aiming for an exhaustive list is somewhat security theatre: chances are, many of your Fedi posts are in Common Crawl, which the instance sending DELETE wouldn't affect – and good luck redacting Common Crawl. Fedi is not a secret medium. (This is not to say that the maximalist "if it's technically possible, I have a right to do it!" position is anything other than a huge violation of privacy.)
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