Does Mastodon Have A Future?

— Posted inSocial Media, Technology — 6 min read

On 2024-09-23 I read that another Mastodon instance is calling it quits. StrangeObject.Space will shut down at the end of the year. You can read their post at https://blog.strangeobject.space/posts/2024-09-23-shutting-down.html

This follows the announcement five days before by Mozilla.Social that they would shut down by the end of the year. Other instances large and small have also gone by the wayside, mstdn.lol for example left a lot of users scrambling for a new home.

This has led many to question whether Mastodon is sustainable. Does it have a future?

Mastodon’s Problems

Moderation. While not the first thing that likely comes to mind, the most common issue I’ve seen with instances that have decided to call it quits is the stress on the moderators.
Any large random selection of humans is going to have a large number of reasonably decent people, a very small selection of saints, and a small but very loud number of assholes. And the assholes come in every flavor from trolls to perpetual victims of imaginary crimes. And those are the ones that make it rough on the volunteer staff of any Mastodon instance.
Even paid moderators on commercial social media sites like Facebook and Twitter have a high burnout rate. Many of them, sadly endure it because they have no other economic choice. ( See this opinion piece on the Washington Post for an illustration of the situation. Go to this archived version if you can’t get past a paywall).

A cartoon of a man wearing glasses. He has longer hair and facial scruff. He is wearing a red shirt. A text bubble reads - I quit my job as a content moderator last year. But I'll never go back to the person I was before I watched those videos. Alberto Quadra ~ former content editor

User Apathy. Perhaps apathy is too strong a word. Passivity may be more accurate. The bulk of users have grown up with centralized social media that gives the illusion that all costs are born by some faceless company who for no reason at all provides a platform on which they can post pictures of their breakfast or indulge in their latest conspiracy. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al have trained users to feel that social media is their birthright, and it’s provided by some benevolent overlord that asks nothing of them.

Mr. Needful aka Lucius Needful, a character from the TV cartoon series “Rick and Morty”

Finances

It takes money to run a server. Instance admins should not have to pay out of pocket to keep an instance going. Many do. But that can’t last. The admin of mstdn.social , @stux made multiple requests for help this last month and still had to pay hundreds of euros out of his own pocket. That’s not fair. That’s not sustainable.

What are the Solutions

Every Mastodon user needs to become invested in their instance in particular, and in Mastodon as a protocol.

Every user needs to be familiar with their instances server rules and code of conduct, and ought to help enforce it.

At an absolute minimum, users who see abusive behavior in a toot should report it. The flip side of that being that users should refrain from reporting everything with which they disagree.

Anyone with the time should be ready to serve as a moderator part-time, whether that means being a moderator one day a month, once a week, several hours a month, or being assigned moderation for every “x” number of incidents.

Admins

Admins need to learn to share responsibilities. I get it. Someone who has the motivation to start an instance wants to see it done right. But it is in the best interest of the Mastodon and the Fediverse as a whole to have more administrators. Admin founders should recruit and train co-administrators to share the load, learn, and perhaps some day start a new instance. An admin who cannot share the duties with other trusted individuals is much more likely to burn out and walk away.

User training

We need to train Mastodon users to realize their responsibilities, and the limitations of the admins and moderators. As part of the onboarding of new users, periodic reminders and tips should be shown to users of an instance to ensure they are aware of the instances policies and procedures, and the part they play in ensuring the instances success and viability.

Financial Support

There are several financial model that can be implemented. Some are more ethical than others.

Corporate ownership. For this I’ll use the example of Mozilla.Social. They ran their own instance and Mozilla paid for everything. To the users, it seemed free. But the problem with corporate or even individual ownership is that you’re at the mercy of the whims of the owner. Mozilla decided to take their ball and go home. A little more than three hundred users now have to migrate.

Returning to the example of mstdn.social. Stux seems to me much more committed to keeping that instance alive. That instance has twenty thousand users. 20,000. Think of that. If each user on that instance paid just one euro each month, it would pay all the bills with enough left over to provide a little extra for Stux and the moderator team.

There are a few instances I know of that have mandatory financial contributions. 500.Social was set up by Kev Quirk, the same person who started Fosstodon.org. But 500.Social requires a $2/month for membership. Minimal. But there’s more to a financial buy-in than just the money. When you contribute to an instance, you’re also buying into it psychologically. That’s your home. You take care of it.



Social.Coop is another instance that requires a buy-in. In their case, the price of admission is £1 GBP / month.

There are likely more. If you know of an instance that requires a paid membership, please let us know in the comments.

Beyond merely keeping the lights on, requiring a monetary contribution also discourages trolls, who can otherwise spin up account after account on the free instances ad nauseam.

One more entity we all need to support- Mastodon itself. Whatever else you think of Eugen Rochko, we owe him and his team a debt for bringing us Mastodon. And we ought to support that team financially. It’s the right thing to do.

Conclusion

Mastodon’s future is up to us. If it fails, it’s our fault. Us. The users. You. Me. Us.

Breaking away from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etcetera is a revolution. Mastodon is a revolution. And a revolution requires sacrifice. Everyone rows the boat. No passengers. No barnacles.

What is a life worth? The man and the hornet.

— Posted inPersonal — 2 min read

I was sitting, reading peacefully and enjoying the breeze coming from the open doors to our balcony, when I heard a buzzing noise coming from the direction of our wall of windows.

I got up and got the spray bottle of water and a sheet of paper towel. Flies do find their way into the condo, and I’ve gotten into the practice of spritzing them with a little water, which keeps them from flying away, then I gently pick them up in the dampened paper towel, carry them out to the balcony and release them to fly away. I do the same thing with the various spiders, stink bugs and lady bugs that find their way into our home.

But when I got to the window, this time was different. The buzz was coming from a hornet trying to get back outside. To my mind, it seemed angry. I considered giving him the fly treatment for a moment, but the prospect of a nasty sting changed my mind.

I got the vacuum cleaner and fired it up. One wave of the wand, and I felt it THUNK! against the hose and into the canister.

I put the vacuum away and that should have been the end of it, but I guess I’m nuts. I couldn’t help but think about the value of a life in this universe. Most of the universe is lifeless, barren and inhospitable. The only life we can be sure of is right here. And I snuffed a tiny bit of life out. Hornets do a good job keeping pests under control and keeping life in balance. That hornet’s only crime was being in the wrong place and making me uncomfortable. It hadn’t stung me. It might have found it’s own way out. But I killed it and I can’t help but wonder if the universe is just a little diminished by that.

NextDNS – Protect Yourself Using DNS

— Posted inPrivacy, Technology — 3 min read

For a little more than a month now, I’ve been using NextDNS, to see if it can provide another layer of protection against ads, trackers and malware. Here are my impressions.

NextDNS replaces your default DNS provider, usually your ISP, unless you’re the kind of technically savvy user who’s used to setting your DNS manually, either in your computer’s settings or in your router.

How it protects you is ingenious. As you browse to a webpage, it often includes a lot of elements that include hidden pixels or scripts that allow the advertising giants to track your interests and present ads based on the data they’ve gathered about you. Or it may include malicious scripts. These days, even going to a legitimate website can expose you to bad actors, as many of them sell advertising space with little control over who buys that ad space or what they inject into those ads.

NextDNS keeps a continuously updated database of trackers, bad actors and iffy websites, and when your computer makes a DNS query for one of those sites, it sidetracks it so that resource isn’t found. Basically sends that to a dead-end. I have yet to find any page that doesn’t load properly even with those extraneous elements blocked.

Set-up is a breeze. NextDNS provides clear, easy-to-follow instructions for Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, iOS, routers and several browsers, although Vivaldi is currently not one of them. But set up your computer or router to use NextDNS and you’re set.

There are paid plans at very inexpensive prices, but I found that even the free plan was more than enough for me. The free plan allows up to 300,000 queries per month. Over the last 30 days, I’ve used a little more than 190,000 queries. Over time you can see the number of blocked queries decreases dramatically. That’s a result of both regular dns caching and a little hack I’ve been using.

In addition to NextDNS I’ve also been creating my own local blocklist by checking my NextDNS logs and adding the trackers’ domains to my local hostfile with a loopback entry. I’ll detail that further in a future blog post.

One use case I’m very excited about is using this for family members. If you’ve read this far, I’m guessing you’re the default IT person for your family and friends. By setting up NextDNS as your mom’s DNS service, you’ll ensure that she won’t accidentally become a victim of a scam when she automatically clicks on that first link in a Google search. I can tell you, trying to explain sponsored placement in a Google search to a 90 year old is a lot more work than setting up NextDNS for my in-laws was.

One caveat for my fellow Vivaldi users. Vivaldi’s wonderful privacy and security settings are pretty granular, but if you’re going to use NextDNS as an additional layer of security, there’s one thing you’ll want to disable. In the Privacy and Security Settings, look under “Google Settings” and uncheck DNS to help resolve Navigation Errors. You want to let NextDNS do your DNS resolution.

So what do you think? If you’re curious about NextDNS check out their website. Give it a try and let me know what your experience is. If you have other tips for foiling bad actors online, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!

Limits are Wonderful

— Posted inProductivity, Technology, Travel — 3 min read

I recently saw a post on Mastodon asking for recommendations for an instance that allowed more characters per toot. Of course I recommended that person migrate to social.vivaldi.net with its very generous limit of 1337 characters. To my thinking, if you can’t express a cogent thought in 1337 characters, you need to think about it more until you can distill it into a shorter post.

It brought to mind the day when Twitter went from a character limit of 140 characters to 280. At the time, I was dead-set against it. For the same reasons I prefer smaller limits on any social media site. Limits enforce brevity. Brevity ensures the author has taken the time to think seriously about a topic enough to condense it into something that can be expressed briefly and cogently.

Today, X, the shell of the former Twitter, allows tweets of up to four THOUSAND characters. That naturally has the result of rambling, incoherent screeds. On my Mastodon account, I try to keep my toots as short as possible. If I go beyond 500 characters, I feel I’ve likely done a disservice.

We travel often, and shake our heads at the sheer volume of gigantic bags people trundle around. This will sound curmudgeonly, but I honestly believe the roller bag contributes to a worse form of tourism. I’ve seen people bring multiple, very specific outfits, every type of shoe, pillows and blankets from home. Those people look more like refugees than tourists.

When we travel, we each bring one small carry-on backpack.

My typical travel setup. Anything that doesn’t fit in this backpack doesn’t go with me.

Because of this, we’re freer to move around, unburdened by the caravan of bags. We never worry about our luggage being sent to some unknown destination because we carry it all with us. Those self-imposed limits give us the freedom to travel swiftly and nimbly, able to make changes without stress.

Other limitations, like tight budgets, spur creativity. I worked for a small company at one point, and we couldn’t afford the big-name subscriptions to manage our infrastructure. So we had to be resourceful and code our own in-house applications. It saved the company hundreds of thousands of dollars to use elsewhere.

I love limits. I hope you’ll learn to see the limits in your life as opportunities for creativity and invitations to greater freedom.

Installing Linux on a Chromebook

— Posted inSoftware, Technology — 3 min read

Hello! This is my first blog post here, so forgive the rough edges. I hope to edit this to polish it a bit, but wanted to get this down.

I bought a Chromebook back in 2014, and was pretty happy with it. I do pretty much everything online, so I didn’t need a lot of processing power or local storage. I would have loved to use it forever, but Google decided it was too old and would no longer support it, meaning no more security updates.

I was torn. I certainly didn’t want to send a perfectly good machine to the landfill, but without security, I couldn’t use it online with any degree of comfort.

So I turned it into a Linux laptop.

Back in ancient history, I jumped right into the cloud-based life by using an HP Netbook as my primary machine. It ran Ubuntu, and I did everything online. It was a basic Chromebook before Chromebooks existed.

It had been a long time since I’ve run a Linux machine, so I started by test-driving a few Linux distros. One great thing about Linux is you can run it from a USB drive on your computer so you can get a feel for it before actually installing it to your hard drive. Among the OSs I tried were Xubuntu, Ubuntu, Zorin, Mint, Tails.net and Ultramarine (both the flagship and KDE/Plasma versions).

I decided I liked Ultramarine, despite never having heard of them before.

Installing it was a bit of a pain for someone who hadn’t had much experience customizing or hacking a Chromebook. I had to put it into developer mode, then download a bios using the shell.

It mostly worked great, with the exception of having to hit CTRL+L every time I booted to bypass Google’s OS verification warning.

Then one day I hit the spacebar by mistake, turning OS verification back on. After that I had a borked machine that only gave me the error that ChromeOS was not present or was corrupted. 🙁

I was a bit discouraged, and couldn’t get past that to reinstall Linux. What I ended up doing was installing Chrome browser on a Windows machine, and yes, I felt a little slimed, then used the recovery extension to create a USB recovery drive. Then I used that to recover that Chromebook, reinstalling ChromeOS on it.

After that, it was back to Youtube, where I stumbled on a video (link later) that mentioned a Write-Protect Screw. I followed that and opened up the Chromebook to find a screw there was completed a circuit on the motherboard, and as long as that screw was there, it prevented flashing the bios, so it kept it tied to ChromeOS. After removing that screw, it was just a matter of flashing the bios and reinstalling UltraMarine Linux.

On a desktop, two laptops. The one on the right is open to a Youtube vide. The one on the left has its case open, showing the motherboard

Now it’s running Ultramarine Linux KDE/Plasma edition and I’ve removed Firefox and installed Vivaldi, of course and I love it. I’m especially tickled by the Xperience Theme that makes it look like an old-school XP box.

I really wish someone would start a program to collect all these old, unsupported Chromebooks and get school children to reprogram them into usable Linux laptops that they could then take home to use and learn computer basics. Maybe someday I’ll take that on.

Find me on Mastodon or alternatively 500.social