building your own mastodon server is stupid

[solarbird]

but, well, i have the dumb, so i made one lol

dunno if i'm gonna keep it yet but

@moira@mastodon.murkworks.net

Comments

[wrog]

Anything in particular that's making it stupid?

Admittedly, I'm sort of unclear on how this decentralized social media thing is supposed to work. Are there well-known servers that people trust? Who runs them?

Or are you concerned about how you're going to get people to trust your own server? Have the mastodon developers come up with a good way to do reputation scoring?

Or is this like running your own email server, (where the moment you open port 25 you get buried in spam)?

[solarbird]

Anything in particular that's making it stupid?

Install is from source and a pain in the arse.

I'm sort of unclear on how this decentralized social media thing is supposed to work. Are there well-known servers that people trust? Who runs them?

There are! But I'm running my own.

Or are you concerned about how you're going to get people to trust your own server?

Oh hell no, this is going to be an invitation server. And there's not an algorithm, it's just who you follow, and you can follow cross-server.

It's feeling like a mix of usenet and livejournal but with ... slightly better search. Usenet Twitter more or less. So far.

But I've only had the server up a couple of hours so who even knows :D

[wrog]

And there's not an algorithm, it's just who you follow, and you can follow cross-server.

Right, I'm just wondering how that works when you piss somebody off (as will inevitably happen) and they launch the botnet to down-vote your server everywhere, and then the cross-server stuff stops working because nobody trusts you anymore. I mean, I'd like to think they've given this some thought and learned various lessons since PGP, but I don't know if they have...

[merelydovely]

Downvote on third-party ranking sites, or...? I didn't think there was a way to upvote or downvote servers. You can block interaction from specific servers if you control a server of your own (this is how most people handle known fascist servers) but I don't think there's any sort of...reputation feature? Even search is pretty locked down bc it was designed with "people who've been harassed on twitter and FB" foremost in mind.

[wrog]

I guess what I'm unclear on is, if there isn't a reputation feature or some kind of third-party ranking, how do you learn that sites are nazi sites without having to review each of them individually and wade through their shit?

Or if it really is that each server operator has to maintain their own blacklist, how does this scale?

[merelydovely]

I think server instances publish their blacklists and you just copy the blacklist of a server you trust for old known problems, then word of mouth gets around for new ones.

Probably doesn't scale that well, but twitter blocking didn't scale thaaaat well either, not without catching a ton of people in automated blocklists they had no reason to be on

[wrog]

it seems they are talking about this, though I also see this issue's been open since 2019.

(from a discussion under someone wanting to defederate from mastodon.social)