A while back, as Twitter lay dying and rotting, I went out and staked new accounts in other social media sites, gambling on which one, if any, would eventually succeed. One was Mastodon; I have an account at octodon.social/@pzmyers. The appeal of Mastodon was that it’s a distributed network, one that isn’t strictly controlled by a central authority. Unfortunately, that means it’s made up of thousands of interconnected instances, all your access to the wider federation, is through the instance you choose, and you’re at the mercy of whoever set up your particular instance. Back in August, I learned that the instance I had chosen was shutting down.
this is it. the ship is sinking.
on 2025-04-03, in 8 months, on its 8 years anniversary, the octodon will be permanently shut down.
use this time to slowly migrate your accounts and download your post archives. tell your local friends who might miss the instance announcement.
the first reply will contain a small list of instances to consider; the second a personal note for my followers.thanks to everyone who supported us, to our crew and members.
i am glad to have built and shared this with you over the years. it was a beautiful horrible adventure. i hope you will remember it as a good place that united so many people for quite a while.it always had to end eventually. for an impulsive little social website, 8 years is a good run. we have witnessed and remember so many friends who are gone. the octodon, too, gets to live impermanence and have a good end while we still can take care of it.
It was a good run, but this is a huge weakness in the service. The volunteers who run individual instances are allowed to just quit? Of course they are allowed, but there’s no automatic fallback to support individual users? Whoops. That’s not good. Do I need to go instance-shopping now, and figure out how to back up my posts there? Then there’s the personal note by the instance host about Mastodon in general:
i’ve had this moment on my mind for many years. 5 years, 10 years? one more, one less? Eight, of course. of course. i barely remember who created it. everything has an end and everyone needs to move on.
personally, i will soon move to a tiny gotosocial instance, and trim down relationships again. i am tired of asking myself if ppl talk to me as an admin or as a friend, let’s find out.
if you need more Whys, unordered:
- it hasnt been fun for so long. i really do not want to do this for the rest of my life. passing it on has limits and is itself tremendous work and trust.
- it knows too much. this database is huge, which is a technical feat to keep available at all times and fast already; and full of forgotten accounts and things that are long offline and should be let go of. yes it’s haunted
- i do not believe in mastodon. i have been less and less comfortable with the software, its direction, technical choices, and maintenance. even with the federated topology entirely. it was built like a twitter clone and requires the same work and has the same flaws
- it’s such a massive amount of personal data to care for, and concentrated for so many people i know. security patches are applied so fast bc it’s genuinely terrifying. it’s not healthy i can tell you, but i know what we all risk and did everything i could. i don’t want to any more. let’s burn it all
- one must imagine sisyphus letting the boulder roll and just sitting there, content and chilling. today i let eugen’s damned rock go down the hill, and i feel fine
i have so little energy left. such short time to use.
all this mess grew until it became a main occupation and i have so much more to dohit me up if you want the exported blocklist, or the emoji collection. i might publish them later as well
Well, that just went from an “oops” to a “yikes!” Maybe I’ll just let my Mastodon account whither and die, unless someone wants to suggest a more stable instance. Maybe.
I also have a Threads account. I don’t care for it and have neglected using it. Threads too often feels like one of those subreddits full of people telling long stories about some trivial annoyance that they recently experienced, or worse, that they experienced 11 years ago and have been waiting for the opportunity to tell everyone about it. There are a lot of good people on there who are happy with it, I just feel vaguely uncomfortable with it. Also, it’s by Meta, so it’s got Zuckerberg’s undead cyborg fingers all over it.
Doubly also LGBT and Marginalized Voices Are Not Welcome on Threads.
Bluesky is taking off right now, and of course I have an account there. I worry that it could meet the fate of Twitter — some rich weirdo could buy it and use it for their public masturbation sessions — but it’s working out well so far, especially given how they’re dealing with the wingnuts.
“Conservatives Join Bluesky, Face Abuse and Censorship.” Yeah, right.
So maybe I’ll just commit to Bluesky from now on, until it gets corrupted and wrecked, as happens to so many things nowadays.
Blue Skies
by Irving Berlin, performed by Ella Fitzgerald
“I worry that it could meet the fate of Twitter — some rich weirdo could buy it and use it for their public masturbation sessions”
Looking back, Musk’s purchase of Twitter may have been an orchestrated move. The information platform was converted into Trump’s bile fountain. How many voters had their minds poisoned leading up to the election?
Thanks for the link to your Bluesky account. I followed it and now I follow you there. I nuked my X account a couple of weeks ago. Bluesky seems more like old twitter and nice so far. I like the “don’t engage, just block” culture and hope it lasts.
I set up on Mastodon when Musk took over Twitter and I still like it. This week I also joined BlueSky and have found way more folks I used to follow on Twitter, so I like it too. mepard.bsky.social [email protected]
I joined Bluesky last week.
I liked it immediately which is a good sign.
So far, how it works isn’t too clear yet.
For some reason, I ended up with large numbers of cat photos in my feed.
There are worse things that could have happened.
Reddit is the other social media that I use although I don’t even have or need a membership.
It’s organic.
I use Reddit a lot because it is useful.
It’s organized by topic and I can follow the topics I’m interested in. One topic is my local city/area. It’s everything from lost cats, to the latest Rave, to the best place to get your windshield fixed.
This is a huge advantage since the local media including the newspaper more or less disappeared.
It had really useful information during the last Covid-19 pandemic.
The Herman Cain Awards in particular were…interesting, watching prominent antivaxxers get Covid-19 virus, die in the hospital, and win the famous and stylish Herman Cain Award featuring a skeleton dressed up as death.
I like Mastodon just fine; I’ve never understood the problems people seem to have with it.
I’ve bailed, for the most part, on Facebook; I only very occasionally post anything or check for postings anymore. I deleted my Twitter account. I spend too much time scanning Mastodon postings as it is; adding another social medium seems counterproductive.
I only visit this site when I get a Mastodon post that tells me something interesting has come up that doesn’t involve spiders or forcing me to look at big pictures of them in the masthead. Sorry, but that’s just me, and I’m getting too old to change that. So if you stop posting on Mastodon, I’ll miss your other discussions, which I usually enjoy and agree with. But you gotta do what you gotta do, so best wishes.
Goodbye Blue Sky
by Pink Floyd
Mastodon sounds like Linux in that someone sets up a project to work on a version and it’s great until the people working on it lose interest and move on. There are many dead distros out there.
I wasn’t on Twitter but I did go with Bluesky because fashy Musk. Following PZ, John Wilkins, Rebecca Watson and Hemant Mehta so far.
I also joined Tribel, but haven’t delved much into it.
I don’t know if this will make a difference for the future, but BlueSky uses open source software, the AT Protocol. Supposedly, it will allow inter-network sharing, and thus be a more robust overall system. (I’m just repeating some of what I’ve seen, so I am sure there are others with better understanding and opinions than mine.)
My mastodon’s server’s going down, too. Seems i’m the only one really using it (even the owner/host never posts much).
There are ways to move your history and connections to another server.
https://fedi.tips/transferring-your-mastodon-account-to-another-server/
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/migrating/
I’m moving to the larger https://universeodon.com/ – it is where George Takei and his substack team are, and has thousands of users, so I expect it’ll last a while, and I trust that the admins there are properly troll-proofing things if Takei’s willing to stay.
That said, I feel a little like the late 80s and the demise of the MUD (MUCK/MUSH) scene as universities discovered new uses for the Sun boxes that the students had set up the MUDs on and wiped the games out. Every time I found a ‘home’ in those online Zork-like games, either the DB crashed or the admins had to kill it.
PZ wrote: until it gets corrupted and wrecked, as happens to so many things nowadays.
I reply: PZ is being healthily, realistically skeptical, not morbidly cynical. Too many things in our society today are failing in many ways. Internet has more sites that don’t load [pharyngula too because of horrible hosting (bluehost?)], too many outbreaks of E-coli and other poisons in our foods, the corruption of billionaire owned main slime media, our entire political system full of toxic loopholes and do nothing, vain, corrupt elected officials, crapitallist corporations owning our lives and raping us with greedflation, etc.
(yes, welcome to the new DARK AGES)
On multi-user site architecture, we see that some kind of helpful, centralized administration is needed to keep it from dissolving or becoming corrupt (coding pun intended). However, the trick is to keep that centralized administration beneficent and not have it become a power hungry, abusive entity. One of the worst examples of that type of corruption is the governments in this country. We have sought out means of preventing that corruption, but have found no effective methods, yet.
Well fuck. The right wing atheists are swarming in on Bluesky now. Why we can’t have nice things:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/11/22/im-on-bluesky/
Oh no, that’s terrible! I don’t have any popcorn.
Once octodon closes shop, I’m done with mastodon altogether. I read a few interesting subreddits (account-less, so I can’t post) and other than FTB, no more “social media” for me.
If Twitter posts are called “tweets”, does that mean Bluesky posts are called “bleets”?
Trickster Goddess, no, because the former are actual words.
(But they could be ‘blues’, vaguely analogically)
I like masto. Been a while since I paid attention to talk about BlueSky…
Re: ahcuah @9:
Apologies for the tonal whiplash here,
https://urbanists.social/@sam/110339902538138997
https://phpc.social/@ramsey/110844080841149372
In July 2003, there was an incident where accounts were getting created with slurs in the names. Users revolted; devs blocked protesters. BlueSky created a slur exclusion list. The n-word was on it. As was the r-word. Then a BlueSky dev took the r-word off (revisions and community commentary here).
Then they refactored, abandoning that long slur list for one with only 6-ish words, regexed to cover letter variations. The n-word is among them.
Code
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/blob/b3046c348fedf7a2d62c7b0f66f71fab4440acd2/packages/pds/src/handle/explicit-slurs.tsDescription
https://github.com/Blank-Cheque/SlursDiscussion
https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/discussions/1329At the time they had $21 million and two devs, refusing to hire a moderation team.
https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/110713203405833275An article this week.
https://www.npr.org/2024/11/19/g-s1-34898/bluesky-traffic-surge-after-electionRe: Trickster Goddess @16:
KnowYourMeme – Skeet
* #18: Oops, my “In July 2003” should’ve been 2023.
John Morales, “Bleet” is what a sheep’s says, or bleats. So yes, it is an actual word.
Fine. I suppose a misspelling counts enough.
Bleat is should be, then. Sounds about right.
Consider me sheepish. :)
—
Here is a take I would probably share, were I on such types of social media (I’ve never tweeted nor shall I ever bleat):
So, Mastodon is failing, Threads is tied to Facebook, Bluesky is a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” … what else is there? Aside from Reddit, but Reddit isn’t so much the next Twitter as it is the next Usenet, or would be if it didn’t have universal, at-times-heavy-handed moderation. It seems to be being used as that, anyway, since it’s where the narrow-interest groups and technical groups have gone.
Re: Bekenstein Bound:
The fediverse, which is 70% Mastodon, is a network of 30,194 independent server instances. When one retires, users migrate to the remainder and carry on (preserveing their follower/following connections). The point is to operate as a resilient fleet of smaller servers that come and go without central points of failure/takeover.
Re: PZ:
Sorry, answering belatedly in case that wasn’t rhetorical.
At present, for individuals, migrating (moving followers connections to a new identity) IS automatic, kicked off by a button press. Yes, shopping is necessary. Create an account elsewhere, export/import what settings you can, and trigger the move. The old account gets mothballed with a redirect notice for passersby (it can be unmothballed if you forgot something).
I collected migration caveats, some indicated as fixed in past updates.
The general expectation is that old posts are lost or locally archived for no particular purpose (some tools can inspect that archive). However if your are determined to save a few important posts, I wrote about a tool called Mastodon Content Mover, which backs up and republishes old posts on a new account. Ideally doing all that posting before the new account is given followers, so they don’t get spammed. The tool does need to create its own backups while the old server is still running.
——
[Spitballing]: An admin feature that mass-bequeaths all lingering users to a last-chance default lifeboat instance seems like a desirable idea, except for logistics of queuing all that traffic to a single destination, and the receiving end would still need account creation with passwords, and the Rip Van Winkle users wouldn’t know where their accounts wound up (I suppose they could get an email with a temp password).
* [Spitballing]: Hm, an admin creating accounts elsewhere in their users’ names would pose ToS and consent problems. If it were implemented, users would need to be involved in the shopping at least that much.
A analysis of Bluesky yesterday from the co-author of ActivityPub, the protocol underlying the fediverse and Mastodon.
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698
Expounded in a blog post: How decentralized is Bluesky?
* #27: Oh WOW, cwebber’s thread at the first link kept going, and going. Click on the last of Christine’s visible posts, and the thread continues. Recapping the whole blog post in chunks, which I did find more readable for sections of the blog I skipped over.
She’s working on something new @spritely—filling out wiggle room deliberately left in the protocol to address shortcomings in current implementations—that might retrofit ActivityPub or succeed it.
* Mastodon is also nonprofit, with CEO Eugen Rochko having refused multiple venture capital offers.
A Faustian bargain.
The architectural differences are also significant. BSky is evidently modeled after Usenet: every server hosts a copy of a database with every message. This makes it costly enough to run one that there will be only a few servers, mostly run by large organizations, and few options for switching. (How many Usenet servers exist now, especially ones that carry the binaries groups? I think just a handful, all large commercial servers, have the binaries groups.)
Mastodon is modeled more after email, but that means you can lose your past posts/messages/history if you move server, unless you keep them locally. However, unlike email, the only option for keeping them locally seems to be to run your own server, which at least is far more lightweight than BSky (or Usenet-with-binaries). I also don’t know how easy it is to get others peering with your hypothetical new server, or whether typical residential ISPs would allow you to run one without interference. (You probably couldn’t expose it on port 80, in particular, though if you intend it only to host your own posts, you might not expose its web interface at all, only whatever is used for the peering connections … if that’s even separate. Exposing a server also raises your attack surface for getting malwared. And what happens to inbound messages during downtimes? Mail and news have retries at intervals for resiliency; does ActivityPub? You might miss messages that chance to arrive while you’re installing the patches you’ll have to frequently install not to get pwned through the server. And you’ll likely have to keep some computer running 24/7, which a lot of people might not be willing or able to do.)
Re: Bekenstein Bound:
It’s just a matter of someone searching for “@[email protected]” from their instance. That triggers an ActivityPub request to your server, your server responds according to protocol, and they can follow the nym to subscribe to future posts. WordPress has an AP plugin that does a barebones implementation to offer blog content, such that it can be reshared identically to anything written on Mastodon. And Mastodon users can reply, which the blog renders as comments.
Mastodon’s fancier, but ultimately, it’s all about being looked up specifically, getting shared, and passed along to followers, who share and/or follow… Lookups and follows are how each instance builds up its own index for searching words and hashtags. Instances derive their awareness from what users seek out.
Ironically, it’s the tiny self-hosted instances that have difficulty finding content from everyone else. Fewer eyeballs to fill out their map of the fediverse. So Mastodon instances are able to subscribe to relay servers offering a firehose of already discovered content.
Pretty sure hosting from home is doable. There are managed hosting companies that offer to run a dedicated Mastodon instance for you. I’m fuzzy on the moment-to-moment details of how messages federate and outages.
HJHornbeck’s running the FtB instance for ~$10 a month. He is unusually picky about who he gives an invite to register there: has a policy of requesting one in a comment on his blog with proof of having commented on FtB for a year. I’m not sure how to comment on his blog though. Certainly keeps the user count low. =P
* Ah, HJ wrote in his policy “take advantage of my comment section“. His blog only allows commenters on one page.
I’m not fan of Eugen, and Mastodon has plenty of flaws, but
1) Mastodon is being worked on and improved
2) Mastodon is unlikely to enshittify, while BlueSky is pretty much guaranteed to.
You are committing yourself to another Twitter.
Honestly, finding another instance and switching is trivial, I did it already a couple of times.