Mastodon

I've been playing around using masto.host to run my own instance. It's fully provisioned, and takes care of all the upgrades. The cheapest plan is 6 bucks a month, which isn't really that crazy. I was already pitching in a couple of bucks for the instance I was using, so it wasn't really a big difference in terms of cost.

I've run it for a week so far without any problems, and it seems to be working as well as the instance I was using before. Big advantage is that I have full control over which servers and accounts I federate with.

The one thing I didn't realize is how much data mastodon servers go through. My instance chewed through the 20 gig limit in just a couple of days initially. Then I set media retention policy to a day and now it peaks at around 15 gigs.

I'd be curious to hear if anybody else decided to run their own instance and their experience with that. Are there any downsides that are not obvious here?

They did create the account a few months ago but only learned about it somewhat recently

I'm looking into setting up Mastodon instance for myself on a very minimal cloud server. To save resources on that box, I'd like to run the web interface on my own server at home, and only have the Mastodon backend running on the VPS. Is it possible to completely get rid of the web interface and only access the instance through the API? What's the best way to achieve this? Does anyone have experience with this, or do you know any useful resources?

Reading this article, and especially the end ...

> CEO Jay Graber told The Verge that the plan is to hand over control of the AT protocol to a web standards body like the Internet Engineering Task Force.

... it almost sounds as if Bluesky is (going to be) as community-run as Mastodon.

But I'm suspicious. What is the catch?

I've recently moved my mastodon instance off masto.host to a server I own. First thing I changed was the character limit and default UI (to Mastodon-Bird UI). But I was wondering about:

• How to increase the maximum image per post limit.
• How to change poll options, like maximum numer of answers.
• How to increase the alt text character limit.

Maybe there are other cool options I forgot about but you want to share 🙂

Does someone know which files to amend?

I have a mastodon.social account (if the instance I'm on matters). I use VPN and notice I'm getting these emails each time I sign in. My account is also just a post viewing account, so I have no account security concerns.

I checked the settings UI in mastodon and all email preferences are content/interaction-related versus security-related - I couldn't find any way of turning these emails off.

Setting up 2FA to extinguish this is out of the question. Is there a way to turn these emails off on the Mastodon side or are my only options to mark Mastodon emails as spam on the email side (or delete the Mastodon account and go back to viewing without an account)?

TIA! :)

@mastodon How to change icon of Mastodon list.

Just started using mastodon. Followers, hashtags, bookmarks, list, etc, etc. Lots of backlog man. Started using lists for organising things better. Anybody know how to change there icon? It is a group like icon by default.

I recently discovered that the "Feature profile and posts in discovery algorithms" checkbox in the account settings is disabled by default. I didn't even know this option existed.

I'm curious why it's disabled by default. I think most users would want to be featured.

Hi, I’m hosting mastodon for personal use on subdomain.domain.tld — it has a valid ssl cert. The issue is that when I set the vanity server name to domain.tld (no subdomain) and create a Let’s Encrypt cert for domain.tld. The namecheap ssl cert checker says that the Hostname doesn’t match the Common Name or/and the SANs.

I have domain.tld redirect via an Alias record to my Synology server (just like the subdomain) but for some reason it’s fine on the subdomain but not for the root domain.

Any one have any experience with this? TIA.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/14785810

> It looks like it will require a manual review process for now but it could be automated down the line.

I am looking for an alternative to bird.makeup (Because it doesn't work anymore) that allows me to follow Twitter accounts on Mastodon. I saw on GitHub there was a tool called Touitomamout (https://github.com/louisgrasset/touitomamout) which is up to date and apparently does the job well but I don't know much about Docker. Is there an instant solution for me to follow Elon Musk on Mastodon 😆.

I’m not going to make a big paragraph to explain myself but here are the positive points:

• No advertising
• Diversified applications
• Very good freedom of expression
• Fedivers
• Verification (using a website)

Now negative points:

1. I was sold instances that served as a mirror with X which would have facilitated integration into Mastodon for users like me. Only 2% of the accounts I follow on X are on Mastodon (Mozilla, Proton).

2. There are not really « fun » accounts like https://x.com/humansnocontext that post funny video clips, I find Mastodon a little too serious, I see a lot of political accounts and sometimes the lives of normal people like mine. It’s a shame 😕. I mean, I chose Lemmy because it’s so much more diverse!

3. You cannot change your username. It’s a shame about that...

Well, that was my opinion on Mastodon.

If you have recommendations, favorites of Mastodon accounts, share them with me.

Hello, I hope you are well.

This is a very special period because I am migrating to the Fedivers. If I’m talking to you here, it’s because you suspect Reddit is a first step! Now I’ve moved to Mastodon. I took the mas.to instance and I was faced with a problem: who to follow? So I was wondering if you had any content proposals that I could follow on Mastodon. I am strongly recommended to follow hashtags so I also take.

(I didn’t know it but thanks to ActivityPub I can follow Lemmy communities from Mastodon, if it’s not crazy)

It would be a solution in the short term but do people know how to mirror a Twitter account for free?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/14961640

> > > We’re excited to announce the Board of Directors governing this newly formed entity: > > > >Esra’a Al Shafei is a human rights advocate and founder of Majal.org > > > >Karien Bezuidenhout is an advocate for openness and supporter of social entrepreneurs. > > > >Amir Ghavi leads Fried Frank’s core technology practices as the co-head of the Technology Transactions Practice > > > >Felix Hlatky has been the Chief Financial Officer of Mastodon since 2020. > > > >Biz Stone is an entrepreneur best known as a co-founder of Twitter, one of the world’s leading social media platforms.

Whats the state of #algorithms on #Mastodon? I mean for the feed. I understand that algorithms based on engagement are problematic, but scaling posts based on posting frequency could help me not have a feed where some people are drowned out by frequent posters...

It's far and away my favorite Mastodon app on both iOS and Android with a beautiful UX design and robust features set that put it in a league all its own.

I'm not able to follow lemmy account / community on a 4.2.8 mastodon instace... Are you on the same situation???

4.3.0 nightly seems to working fine...

Mastodon.social is down. Pretty rare. What do now?

I'm thinking about joining mastodon, but I don't know what server to go with, and the list of servers seems to have very little information about each. Right now I think I'll open an account on mastodon.social.

I'd prefer a server with a high character limit and that has access to most other servers.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/12225991

> TL;DR: The common view on Meta’s Threads is that it will be either all good or all bad, leading to oversimplified and at the end contra productive propositions like the Fedipact. But in reality, it’s behaviour will most likely change dynamically over time, and therefore, to prevent us getting in a position, in which Threads can actually perform EEE on us, we need to adapt a dynamic strategy as well.

I came across this blogpost regarding Mastodon. I would love to get you guys thoughts. This is from earlier in the year, the authors thoughts may have changed but not likely. Some points make sense others not so much.

(This is an extended version of one of the most widely re-shared post I have ever written on Mastodon.)

The new "Threads" app by Meta (Facebook) is just the old 4-E strategy strategy to destroy Mastodon:

1. Embrace:

   (what they are doing now) launch a competing but compatible service with that of Mastodon. The vast majority of users, most of whom don't care about the privacy and intimacy of the Mastodon network, will go with the brand with the most name recognition. The number of users already signed up for Threads shows this to be true.

2. Extend:

   make their service appear to be better with features like search, which they have the resources to do, but the rest of the Mastodon network does not. Also include features for tracking and advertising, sell this as a good thing, "a better place to grow your personal brand, your business." When people think about joining either Facebook Threads or some other Mastodon instance, which will they choose? "Oh, Threads users can also talk with Mastodon users so they are basically the same? Well, why not just use Threads then?" The one with the most name recognition will always win.

   Then comes the blogs and YouTube videos about, "I tried Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed, each for 1 month, here is what I learned" type videos in which the author decides Threads or Bluesky is best because they have better features and you don't have to decide which instance to join.

3. Extinguish:

   after attracting a critical mass of users large enough to decimate the user base of the competing Mastodon network, and temporarily making appear to have better features like search, quietly remove compatibility with the Mastodon network.

   This might effect only 10% of Mastodon users because the other 90% will be on Threads. Then people will think, "who cares if we lose contact with that tiny minority of old Mastodon users, they should have just joined Threads by now anyways, they still can. It has search, and more people voted for it with their patronage. And you don't have to think about what instance to join, its easier\!"

   At this point, people begin to wonder what the point of Mastodon even is.

4. Enshittification:

   without any real competition to keep people from leaving for an alternative, start exploiting users for more and more content for ad revenue, while also exploiting advertisers with ever-increasing costs of ad revenue, while also cutting costs on the quality of their service until it becomes unusable. But at this point it is too late for Mastodon, the momentum it once had is now long gone and no longer a threat to the Meta corporation. Their investment paid off.

Meta is one of the worlds largest corporations that has made most of its money not just through advertising but from gathering and selling people's personal information. They are scared to death about losing control over the Internet that they had gained over the past 15 years or so, and they are fighting to take that control back for themselves.

We built this, but now a corporation like Meta/Facebook feels they have the right to exploit it for all its riches until it is destroyed. Don't let it happen. Join the Fediblock cause, it is the only way to protect our home-grown community from corporate take-over.

Eugene Rochko thinks Threads is good, he is wrong

Eugene Rochko who developed Mastodon as a Twitter-like app based on the ActivityPub protocol, has a blog post explaining why he thinks federating with Threads is good for Mastodon.

> We have been advocating for interoperability between platforms for years. The biggest hurdle to users switching platforms when those platforms become exploitative is the lock-in of the social graph, the fact that switching platforms means abandoning everyone you know and who knows you. The fact that large platforms are adopting ActivityPub is not only validation of the movement towards decentralized social media, but a path forward for people locked into these platforms to switch to better providers. Which in turn, puts pressure on such platforms to provide better, less exploitative services. This is a clear victory for our cause, hopefully one of many to come.

!Eugen Rochko: \<q\>if you've got questions about what interoperability with Threads means, we wrote this up back in July, and you can still refer to it. Make no mistake, this is huge for Mastodon. Currently people have to choose between X, Mastodon, and Threads, and network effects play a dominant role in that choice. IF we can say, you can access all the folks that went to Threads from a Mastodon account, that makes it a far more attractive option given all of its other perks :winking\_face:

No, Threads will get people to leave Mastodon in droves. Really all Facebook is doing here is leaching users away from Mastodon. The average user doesn't know or care about the “perks” of non-Facebook Mastodon instances that Eugene is talking about. They will go with the service with the most name recognition every time, rather than trust an independent, small-time instance operator.

Threads is just Facebook with ActivityPub compatibility and extended Facebook's ads and tracking. The goal is to pull people away from decentralized networks and back to being under their control. Then the network effects Eugene is talking about will kick in, but moving people away from Mastodon and toward Threads.

History repeats itself again

We have seen all this before. Google did something similar when they first embraced support for the open and federated XMPP protocol in their Google Talk (GChat) app, and exactly the situation I described above happened. Eventually Google shut it down, and started calling the original XMPP apps "unauthorized third-party apps," although in fact Google was itself originally a third-party to the existing XMPP services that existed before GChat was invented.

People can and do still use XMPP, and I would encourage you to use it as well for video/voice/text chat. But all that momentum and popularity was extinguished, and was never really regained, at least not in the 9 years since Google extinguished it. So Google was successful in destroying a community of federated services using a popular communication protocol that made it difficult for Google to track and control people on the Internet.

We know for sure what Facebooks goal is not: they do not want to do something good for the various communities of people that have organically sprung-up around Mastodon and the other ActivityPub-based federated social networks. Mastodon does not need to make this mistake with Facebook Thraeds.

Mastodon and ActivityPub are important

Mastodon became most popular in the wake of Elon Musk buying out the Twitter corporation. Calling himself a "free speech aboslutist," which sounds as though he believes everyone should have a voice online no matter how unsavory that voice might be, quickly proved to be anything but a proponent of free speech, quietly censoring his critics and the political groups he hated, while giving a voice to everyone else, including (seemingly enthusiastically) giving a voice to racists and hate speech.

This happens every so often, although not always with the amount of drama churning around a single central figure such as Elon Musk. People see how dangerous it is that the communities we form over the Internet can only actually exist at the whims of an impersonal corporation that might at any point go insane and destroy their communities. When an Elon Musk event happens, then the problem becomes clear to everyone: they had been putting their faith into a monarch and/or despot like Twitter, and now it has turned against them.

The solution to this is, and always has been, the democratic approach, which in this case is Mastodon. Do not allow any one authority to have aboslute control over the plane of existence. Allow people to opt-in, and give them a say in how their community is run. Trust that people are smart enough to understand what is in their own best interest, and allow them to make their own decisions and cast their own votes. This is how ActivityPub and Mastodon work. But if a democracy is not careful, it can easily be overwhelmed and elimitated by the well-equipped armies competing for their resources.

If @mastodon becomes thread-like, I'll leave social network forever. I'm done with meta wanting to control everything, chiefly the freedom of speech in a network used to communicate. I mean, really? The upsidedown World.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/6792877

> TL;DR: The current Mastodon-signup is only removing the confusion of users on first glance, because it either hides the server-choice altogether, or leaves them with a choice that is impossible to make at this point of their Mastodon-journey. Instead, it should introduce them to decentrality on a lower scale, with a handful of handpicked servers to choose from, such that the decision makes sense to them and shows them the merits and fun of the concept instead of scaring them away. Ideal would be to give them a sense of agency. Then, chances are higher that they consider migrating again in the future and eventually internalize it as a permanent option of the digital world.

Check out my other social media pages, need to add Mastodon!!

Can i post xxx videos on here, or nah?

@mastodon

I totally agree with him. This will bring more people to the fediverse once they realize they can interact with their friends on Threads

is there some API or other mechanism that allows me to create a contact form on my site and have the messages delivered to my mastodon inbox?

\#hello friends on @mastodon

Exited to join @mastodon