Hello #mastodon friends ...

Still looking for some of your old #twitter folks #onhere?

https://movetodon.org is super easy.

1️⃣ go to the site
2️⃣ log in to twitter
3️⃣ log in to mastodon
🎩 search magic
📄 list of twitter folks on mastodon
✅ ⛔ select the ones you want to follow here

My 0.02: diversify, find new people too, don't just recreate 🐦

Reading threads of people brainstorming on how to moderate the fediverse and it's obvious a good 80% to 90% of these people have never had to moderate anything remotely as toxic as social media. Or anything at all.

I moderated a default subreddit. I don't care if you paid me a living wage. I would have burned out the same way I burned out being unpaid. It has nothing at all to do with what you get in return. It is quite literally soul-crushing, and my subreddit wasn't even as toxic as it could have been.

I want things to be the best that they can, but they need to be addressed be people who have had heavy experience with this kind of thing. Also — you are never going to find a one size fits all answer. Is everyone going to have to go with this one solution or get defederated?

I dunno, man. I want a solution, but so far the things I'm hearing that excite people are to me, with the moderating experience I have, not reassuring.

someone on Twitter asked why we think ActivityPub sucks from a protocol and implementation standpoint, and we're porting it over here with minor cleanups:

several things — from a server perspective, the most popular implementation requires that you become an SRE for Nginx, Rails, Postgres, Redis, Sidekiq, and possibly ElasticSearch. IMO, these (especially postgres) are nontrivial services to maintain over the long term.

once you pick a piece of Activitypub-compatible software, as far as we can tell, you're locked into that particular branch — you cannot simply export a Mastodon database into the GotoSocial implementation, you have to set up GotoSocial brand new, and make everyone refollow you

protocol-wise, we keep finding shocking ways in which activitypub is worse than email; the biggest pecadillo (IMO) is that if i follow 100 people on 3 servers and make a post, my server has to make 100 requests, one per follower, instead of 3 posts, one per server

the way the protocol works is that if two large instances defederate each other, it causes a notification storm for everyone downstream that can overwhelm smaller instances

so! if you run your own, you pretty much have to become a cache SRE, web-tier SRE, DB SRE, queue SRE, Rails SRE, you have to know how to secure unix systems, mitigate attacks, and if you're responsible, you have to do replication and backups.

sure, Docker has made it so that you can stand up all of this easily, but long-term maintenance? are you really confident that you know what you're doing here? Oh, sure, you've offloaded a lot of this to your cloud provider, but then you're now dependent on that provider continuing to work. Unless you're a large corporation with a secure contract, your cloud provider most likely doesn't care about you.

in short, standing up our own mastondong is signing up for a whole lot of Actual Work that we don't really want to do just to talk with friends, and we absolutely must stress that we both worked for twitter for 6 years and run our own **email server* for 21*

#We_Are_Plural_Not_An_Entire_SRE_Org

As #activitypub and the #fediverse is more than just Mastodon, please tell me what other things you're doing? I'd really like to get more involved with the wider #federated universe but have no idea what's out there.

Please Boost so I can hear from everyone!