from Hacker News

Your Organization should run its own Mastodon server

by KindAndFriendly on 11/7/22, 6:07 PM with 233 comments

  • by mberning on 11/7/22, 6:32 PM

    If the idea of federated Twitter was so good and so important why did everyone seemingly only get interested in it right now? Charitably it would seem that this is just the topic du jour and "top of mind" for many people due to recent changes at Twitter. But if running your own Mastodon server is a good idea today, surely it was a good idea two weeks ago. Cynically, it seems that many of these people seem motivated by their animus towards Elon rather than their genuine belief that federation is the right way forward. After all, these people were perfectly happy to keep using and promoting Twitter when it was ideologically captured by their in group. Now that Elon owns it, well, now it sucks and is bad.

  • by anderspitman on 11/7/22, 6:34 PM

    Yes. But even more important is software like Mastodon needs to get easier for people to selfhost, by about an order of magnitude. It shouldn't be any more difficult or less secure to run your own Mastodon instance than it is to run an app on your phone.

    In my vision of the future internet, when you upgrade your phone, your old phone gets plugged into a power socket and USB drive in the corner and becomes your new selfhosting server. You have apps for Mastodon, Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Plex, calendars, whatever.

    The key pieces missing are simple tunneling services (think ngrok with a GUI designed for selfhosters), easier domain name management, and porting apps to run on phones. The most difficult is the last one but I'm hopeful that virtualization will take care of that in the near future[0], and maybe things like Wasm in the long run.

    EDIT: PS - If you're interested in making this world a reality, join us over at https://forum.indiebits.io/

    [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/ybq4ih/pixel_7_has...

  • by vsareto on 11/7/22, 6:28 PM

    Fair warning about this Mastodon behavior that can lead to embarrassment/leaks as new people start to use it:

    https://mastodon.social/@mmasnick/109299348553543784

  • by Arubis on 11/7/22, 6:19 PM

    Those of you with experience running a Mastodon/ActivityPub server and sales chops, now's the time to start cold calling all your local news outlets and offering to take their money.

  • by mensetmanusman on 11/7/22, 6:20 PM

    Not trivial. Slack/teams are built to handle confidential communications with legal oversight.

  • by danhon on 11/7/22, 6:20 PM

    I wrote about this as well, about a week and a half ago:

    https://newsletter.danhon.com/archive/4230/

  • by mgraczyk on 11/7/22, 6:49 PM

    I believe for internal communication, Twitter style social networks are a net bad.

    At Facebook we used a facebook-esque product called Workplace for this sort of thing. I believe it harmed the culture because people would chase clout and visibility on the social network instead of doing real work. Social networks encourage that kind of behavior.

    I think slack, discord, or similarly un-networked products are a better fit for company communication. Anything that shows "follower counts" is probably not good for companies.

  • by ngrilly on 11/7/22, 6:35 PM

    Is there any Mastodon managed hosting where you can bring your own domain, a bit like Fastmail but for Mastodon?

  • by hdesh on 11/7/22, 7:09 PM

    Maybe Mastodon already handles many of the following concerns. However I can imagine any organization would go through a series of questions before they start running their own server:

    1. How much does it cost?

    2. Who does it benefit?

    3. Who takes the ownership of the deployment?

    4. If something needs to be fixed with the deployment, who does that?

    5. Why should I prefer this over say slack/teams, where I get support bundled in my contract?

    6. What happens if someone puts up something nasty on the internal mastodon network? The legal department hates this one weird trick.

    7. Does it create a headache for the HR department if people start violating their corporate code of conduct on the mastodon network?

    Maybe I am pessimistic, but OP is probably being quite dreamy here.

  • by incomingpain on 11/7/22, 6:43 PM

    Mastodon back in 2019 had a grand opportunity to set themselves up for success; they made the wrong decision. If they had made the correct decision in 2019; they could have in 2020 doubled down on the correct decision during the hunter biden laptop conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, Mastodon will forever remain nothing because of this decision.

    Mastodon has no nazis, it does have that going for them.

    https://www.vice.com/en/article/783akg/mastodon-is-like-twit...

  • by emp_ on 11/7/22, 6:37 PM

    You see it meme'd relentlessly about the concept of having "fuck you money" and the crazy things one could do.

    Well, it finally happened in a undisputable, greatest possible example kinda way, and now everyone is scrambling to adjust.

  • by grzes on 11/7/22, 6:22 PM

    why is hacker-news flooded lately with mastodon-related content? it's irritating

  • by badwolf on 11/7/22, 6:12 PM

    That way everyone can subscribe to your company's professional toots on masto

  • by parentheses on 11/7/22, 6:55 PM

    “open source communities” are mostly good for topic oriented communities. otherwise, i believe commercial motivations are great for maximizing participation.

    in the end communities with maximum participation will always be where creators are incentivized to be.

    until the average user becomes willing to pay for X, ad based revenue models will always win. relatedly, paying for X is easier than setting up your own mastodon server.

  • by nemo44x on 11/7/22, 6:43 PM

    This is such backwards thought. You don't want to make your social network presence a place people have to go to. You want your presence to be where people go to. Centralized social networks give people who publish content massive audience potential. Running your own Website for this completely misses the point and you might as well just add a forum to your site.

  • by c7b on 11/8/22, 1:22 PM

    Ok, but how large does the organization need to be for that to make sense, or how do you determine that?

    I was recently brainstorming some ideas with a friend who has a 1-person business where it would make sense for clients to be able to connect with each other. The thought of Mastodon briefly crossed my mind, but it seemed too ambitious.

  • by brodouevencode on 11/7/22, 6:11 PM

    NOW this is of concern. Is this more backlash talk or an honest thought? If the latter why just now and not six months ago?

  • by sneak on 11/7/22, 6:25 PM

    No organization wants to do this, unfortunately.

    Twitter and Instagram are “free”. Running servers costs money, made more expensive by the choice in the Mastodon design to not support virtual hosting on a per-domain basis. You have to run (and admin) a complete new instance of Mastodon for each domain you wish to support.

  • by phailhaus on 11/7/22, 6:39 PM

    > How do you connect to millions of people without using Facebook or Twitter?

    Oh interesting! Let me check out their instance that they linked to: "Find us at https://toot.thoughtworks.com"

    > This is a Mastodon instance solely for employees of Thoughtworks.

    Whoops!

    In general, I don't see how this helps a company at all to reach the millions of users that they could through Facebook or Twitter. On those platforms, it's automatic and immediate. On Mastodon, it seems like you have to actively court users one at a time? Because ThoughtWorks wasn't even able to reach me, and I read their entire article. I went directly to their instance and learned nothing.

    EDIT:

    Aha! It turns out that the landing page is a red herring, and you can still click through to the "See What's Happening" page. I don't see how a non-technical user would figure this out and not get immediately discouraged. Linking to the /public page would have made a lot more sense.

  • by adhoc_slime on 11/7/22, 6:59 PM

    I must be missing something, all I'm seeing on Mastodon is people talking about Mastodon and Musk and Twitter. Its even more insufferable than the twitter discourse right now.

  • by myth_drannon on 11/7/22, 6:25 PM

    The writer of the article works for Thoughtworks. Do they offer consulting services related to Fediverse?

  • by haunter on 11/7/22, 6:55 PM

    Well maybe one day my workplace will have its own masto and finally I can toot in my office

  • by taylodl on 11/7/22, 6:43 PM

    The Disney company should heed this device and call their server(s) Mousetodon. I think they'd kill it. Heck, they could automatically enroll everybody subscribed to Disney+. They could even have different servers for different sets of fanbases to focus on - Marvel, Star Wars, etc.

  • by seydor on 11/7/22, 6:39 PM

    people have asked for this for years. Would be great if it happens, but it s actually suspicious that suddenly everyone wants people to do that and that this narrative is pushed by the media.

  • by MikusR on 11/7/22, 6:57 PM

    Don't forget to block the "bad" servers.