| HN Mirror

That is not an unreasonable assumption, no, for a service.

I would posit that your error is in thinking of Mastodon as a service, rather than a community of people trying to get away from using "services" to live our lives through.

In that context, I would expect exactly these sorts of errors, and as an admin, I would expect the community to understand and be forgiving, because we are all figuring this out together as we go - again, with only the money in our bank accounts.

I think that if you're genuinely interested in participating in the Mastodon project and helping it to succeed, I would suggest that writing a polemic which reflects your service-based expectations and shits on the efforts of the earnest sysops who do this for the passion of it and the desire to see this better alternative happen is about the worst way to express your frustration at losing data that you had the option to do a weekly backup of yourself.

You need to let go of your "service" expectations and start thinking of Mastodon as what it is: a network of personal computers which people are using to talk to each other. You need to think of your personal Mastodon profile the same way you think about your personal hard drive.

> you had the option to do a weekly backup of yourself.

I would gladly do this, as I gladly back up the data on my own personal hard drive, but I had no idea I needed to do a weekly backup of my Mastodon data! Nobody warned Mastodon users that this kind of data loss was to be expected. By the time I found out, it was too late.

How many of the 1.8 million monthly active Mastodon users are doing weekly backups of their Mastodon data? When has Eugen Rochko or other Mastodon instance administrators ever advised Mastodon users to this?

You seem to be blaming the victims here. And again, it's not just me: every user of my old instance experienced the same data loss, whether they know it or not (likely not).

There's no "community" if the Mastodon instance administrators are not making crucial announcements to Mastodon users, not helping those users preserve their data. If anything, I have just performed a service to the Mastodon community by informing Mastodon users that their data is not safe on the instances.

Instead of properly warning users, they spread reassuringly false bromides like "It doesn't matter which Mastodon instance you join." As it turns out, this matters a lot.

Oh, also...

>How many of the 1.8 million monthly active Mastodon users are doing weekly backups of their Mastodon data?

I obviously do not have that information, but I would say this:

Anyone who makes a habit of actually exploring the Preferences of a new thing they're trying out, will have gone and looked at the Preferences area of their Mastodon page.

There they will have discovered the Data Export page, where it is explained to them that they have the option to do weekly backups, generally speaking.

Anyone who thinks about backups as a thing they try to do will just naturally start to do backups of this very personal data as soon as they feel the data is important enough to rate backing up.

People who have been using a Service to handle their backups, well, they might just kinda blow over that aspect of things and trust Big Machine Daddy to handle that, like the vast majority of internet users do.

As I keep saying, the problem here is people's expectations, which is born of not really understanding what the thing is in the first place. I read an article here on HN sometime back on some business times or financial post maybe, I don't remember, but I do remember they called Mastodon a "Vendor".

So many people simply do not understand so much. It was not so easy to say that in earlier times because it was not so easy to see that. It is now quite easy to see.

Have you looked at a Mastodon archive? The posts are just one giant json file. Good luck finding and reading anything.

The ability to read threads of conversations is totally destroyed with the content cache retention period, and nothing can really recover that for a Mastodon user, not even an archive. That's why it's called an "archive" and not a "backup". Backups can be restored. And indeed, you can't even export/import your posts from one Mastodon instance to another instance.

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu-sn&q=...

I was led to believe you could; when I left the main instance, I downloaded my data and have been planning to try uploading it to my new one but have not yet done so. But that's whey they have an export and import page.

But your case is one of demonstrating the strength of Mastodon. If you don't like what Twitter is doing, your only choice is to leave. If you don't like what your instance is doing, you have any number of others to try out.

I'm not defending the server option or its use; I don't have to because it's Mastodon. You should likewise point out the problem in a more constructive way.

And if you find the format unreadable, perhaps you should work on a little code yourself to make a Mastodon Archive Reader app. Or perhaps... oh look, here's a few for you to try:

You're working very hard to not accept responsibility for your own data. You are not bad for this fact, but you are pretty typical.

> I was led to believe you could; when I left the main instance, I downloaded my data and have been planning to try uploading it to my new one but have not yet done so. But that's whey they have an export and import page.

Look at the /settings/imports page. These can be imported: following list, bookmarks, lists, muting list, blocking list, domain blocking list. Also, your followers are automatically migrated. Nothing else can be migrated or imported, definitely not your posts.

> You're working very hard to not accept responsibility for your own data.

You're working very hard to absolve Mastodon administrators and developers of any responsibility for user data.

> You are not bad for this fact, but you are pretty typical.

Exactly. If the "price" of joining a social network is becoming an administrator or a developer yourself, then forget it. Hardly anyone wants to deal with all of that crap just to write little social media posts online.

I suspect that in your own mind, you believe that you're defending Mastodon, but in reality this attitude scares most people away from it.

Again though, you need to examine your expectations here. These are not Admins who have qualified for a job - some might happen to be that, but most are not. Most are just people who want this to happen, again, and are doing their best.

That being said, new tools come out all the time to improve the situation; "we" (I am not an admin, just a fan) are figuring out what a functioning federated social network needs by doing a federated social network. Mistakes will be made.

The answer to the mistakes is not retreating to "monolithic single-entry service only without billions of dollars of startup capital," which is what your advice to only go to the biggest instance smacks of.

There is a new thing, I encountered the hashtag yesterday but I can't recall it now and I didn't look closely, but it's some sort of database I think in which instance admins can leave notes and ratings of other instances, or something like that. I wish I could remember the hashtag, but it looks to me like an attempt to at least start setting up a clearing house type thing for the deeper details of instance administration.

I believe the problem it was created to solve has more to do with moderation and lazy admins who don't bother doing it, but it could easily be extended to examine the settings of instances and give users optics.

I'm certainly not saying that you should not point out that this is happening, by the way, and if your admin was lazy/complacent/obnoxious about it, you are quite correct to leave. I, likewise, chose to leave the main instance some time back, and I'm not gonna get into why, it was different and personal reasons, and the miracle of this network is that I found a new place that suits me as well.

I do think your piece reads as entitled and ignorant, and you should give it a rewrite with a better understanding that you are addressing a community, not a company.

edit: OP has decided he doesn't want me to comment further apparently, I am no longer able to reply, but I can still edit.

In response to the reply below, I lost all my posts on Lemmy a few weeks ago because of a CSAM post attack which basically made them need to wipe the database, from what I read. Shit happens when you're doing something out of pocket with nothing but what's at hand.

The entire Fediverse is experimental and held together with duct tape and spit. Don't make the mistake of thinking it isn't again.

That said, I stand corrected in my original, flip response. lapcat did not advocate going back to Twitter.

> These are not Admins who have qualified for a job

I've become painfully aware of that.

> That being said, new tools come out all the time to improve the situation

Actually, the new "tool" — the content cache retention period — was the problem here, not the solution. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/19232

> I do think your piece reads as entitled and ignorant, and you should give it a rewrite with a better understanding that you are addressing a community, not a company.

I think your comments read as obtuse and ignorant. They smack of false dichotomies, as if any criticism of Mastodon is support of Twitter, kind of like the attitude that any criticism of Apple is support of Google, or any criticism of Democrats is support of Republicans. Your very first comment above: "The experimental platform with no VC funding whatsoever messed up, I'm going back to the fascist wasteland that is trying to juice me for money by showing me enraging content." Whereas my article had nothing whatsoever to do with Twitter, which wasn't even mentioned, and which I already left permanently. Also, Mastodon is not "experimental". It's more than 7 years old now.

> edit: OP has decided he doesn't want me to comment further apparently, I am no longer able to reply, but I can still edit.

Hacker News doesn't have a feature to block replies. (I wish it did.)

I replied to myself above, but it seems that there's a delay between a comment appearing and the ability to reply.

My bad, OP, you are not censorious.

edit: and you, speaking directly, did not advocate for Twitter. I was way off on that one point.

> it seems that there's a delay between a comment appearing and the ability to reply.

Yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880780

It's strange, but I think I figured it out - there's some sort of delay, seemingly, between a response appearing in the thread and the option to reply being there.

So let me leave my wrong statement above intact and add that OP did not censor me, I just have no patience for this service, apparently lol

walterbell 995 days ago

How many humans (1-10? 10-100? 100-1000?) from the Mastodon community signed off on the Mastodon feature/policy which enabled admins to (inadvertently?) delete user content without advance notice to affected users?

I'm not sure what's my favorite part of this question, but I think it's the fact that you undoubtedly have, like me, agreed to all sorts of outlandish terms on corporate EULAs.

You saw the South Park episode, what they call it, with the... oh yeah, The Human Centipad, you saw that, right?

Does Mastodon even have an EULA? Maybe it needs one. It could say "Your data is your data, we do not own it, we won't sell it, and we also won't guarantee to store it for you indefinitely, so do your backups like a smart person."

edit cause I can't be bothered anymore

> lessons will be learnt eventually.

Yep. Have a great day!

walterbell 995 days ago

EULAs and immortal social constructs like corporations are independent of the consequences of human actions upon other humans. Narratives of amorphous unaccountable Mastodon "community" don't change the fact that one or more humans made policy decisions with consequences for other humans. Fortunately, there are many projects competing to replace Mastodon, so lessons will be learnt eventually.