Ash Furrow

> Large central services give reasonable stability as to not easily shut down altogether, having your account and all content removed. On Mastodon, this is a constant threat.

I'd be interested to see the halflife of centralized services generally to be able to tease out the patterns in a way less vulnerable to survivorship bias. I recognize that invoking Google's product shutdowns is like the free space on the HN comment bingo card, but... You could also point to the cases where Google shuts down someone's entire business or life on the internet for opaque reasons, without the user having any meaningful recourse, as a "constant threat" of a system that's scaled beyond the human.

This conversation was just very, very different before the move feature. When mastodon.technology announced it needed to shut down (https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/), yes, the users learned they would lose their little chunk of namespace – old URLs would break, old content would need to be downloaded to archive – but the crucial thing is the social graph, and the move feature lets you pick up and move your followers. This is like if I could reach into the contacts files of everyone who had my email and update it. This means that "having [my] account and all content removed" is just a lot less big of a deal than when e.g. Facebook nukes someone's account.

> There’s another exodus of twitter users, and most servers are run by individuals

Again, Expecting non-techies to self-host their own instances after several of them falling over due to light usage and signups is quite wishful thinking and reiterates the need for users to heavily rely on more centralized instances to on board users.

Well all know what happened to mastodon.technology which was run by an individual. It doesn't look smart to sit on an instance that can barely handle hundreds of thousands of users signing up at once and ends up folding up.

> give them time or run your own instance and federate

Yeah, the journalists at journa.host has never been more alive for journalists and is going just great with a much better reach than Twitter [1] /s.

[0] https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/

[1] https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1594432548222152705

I find it difficult to get my head around mastodon and federated messaging in general.

It seems like a lot of effort to go to when all I want is a social messaging app. I want to make an account once and be able to message anyone else on whatever app I'm using, not have to worry about whether my chosen node happens to be connected to theirs, not to mention that something like this [0] can happen and then apparently you need to personally handle migrating your data to another instance. These are technical details, not things that users should need to think about.

I don't see any federated messaging platform becoming popular until it reaches the point where users don't even have to understand what "federated messaging" means.

[0] https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/

Here is a list of some:

http://speirs.org

http://mattgemmell.com

http://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/

http://nshipster.com

http://www.objectivesee.com

http://www.fruitstandsoftware.com/blog/

http://ashfurrow.com/blog/

http://www.cimgf.com/

http://www.cocoawithlove.com/

All of them extracted from here:

http://ashfurrow.com/blog/blog-resources

And some more:

http://objectivesea.tumblr.com/

http://soff.es/

And finally, this is not a blog, but a series of videos, and not all the videos are free ($9/month subscription), but I think it's a great resource:

http://nsscreencast.com/

Edit: added some urls

I'm using Feedly. Checking it once a couple of weeks and happy about my flow.
Here are the blogs that I follow:
- https://jvns.ca/atom.xml
- http://rachelbythebay.com/w/atom.xml
- https://blog.kowalczyk.info/atom.xml
- https://ashfurrow.com/feed.xml
- https://sneak.berlin/feed.xml
- https://sookocheff.com/index.xml
- https://www.hanselman.com/blog/feed/rss
- https://zachholman.com/atom.xml
- https://www.wezm.net/v2/rss.xml
- https://alexdanco.com/feed/
- https://tyler.io/feed/
- https://tylertringas.com/feed/