Mastodon.tech has great potential with its name recognition of the former Mastodon.technology that had over 30,000 members! You can achieve these numbers of members with the right server.

By setting up a donation account like Patrion like the majority of Administrators, you can offset your costs.

It’s for sale to a Administrator with a bigger server. The current VPS is too small & slow causing users to leave. Out of 614 registered users, only 37 are active due to lag. 2792 total posts & 18,555 peers.

For only $470 usd, you receive the domain “Mastodon.tech,” & the VPS server with everything loaded/working.

You will take over our VPS at WisHosting.in that runs an 8GB system at $76.80/year.

Feel free to ask questions

Please take a second and watch the injustice served to one of the most famous software YouTubers with over 205,000 subscribers, Derek/DistroTube:

I was so disappointed in Ash for his intolerance and it's the left thar preaches "Tolerance" of other's views.
The ironic part is that Derek wasn't even a Trump supporter, he avoids politics. He was just trying to be fair to both sides.

As Ash's Mastodon.technology is closing, & I'm following in his footsteps to create a new Tech-focused social at Mastodon.tech, I'm proud to right this wrong by promoting Derek to Moderator of Mastodon.tech and doing everything in my power to promote his fair & balanced software channel.

Registration is open & we invite you to join us at a software/technology focused social network:
https://Mastodon.tech/signup

Please tell me what you think?

It was hailed as a progressive alternative to Twitter. But marginalized, queer users are being alienated by well-off tech bros.

Author: Valens Posted on Jan 18, 2019

It’s 9am on a Tuesday, early morning by cybre.space’s standards. Few have logged on to the microblogging social network, and it shows: A follower feed filled with more than 31 users updates at a snail’s pace. It’s much slower than one would expect on Twitter. But then again, cybre.space isn’t Twitter. It runs off a decentralized social media software called Mastodon, and is part of a much larger network of Mastodon communities.

Over on Twitter, users post jokes about President Donald Trump, this time of a fast food feast he prepared for the Clemson Tigers football team amid the ongoing government shutdown. But the words “Trump” and “shutdown” only appear once each on cybre.space’s “local timeline,” which shows posts on the site and any other connected “instances,” or Mastodon communities. It’s even more barren on this reporter’s home timeline: No one is talking about hamberders.

Posting works differently on cybre.space than Twitter. It’s much more like living in a queer house, one that prefers to talk about political theory over current events. Some users chat about democratic socialism and queer identity, while others talk about games, music, fandom, or their difficulties navigating trans healthcare. One user posts a message that reads “re: hrt” with a few lines about their hormone replacement regimen hidden underneath, accessible only via the “show more” content warning (CW) button next to it. Another boosts a post praising Tallahassee by the Mountain Goats, calling it a “visceral experience.”

Cybre.space has just over 2,000 users. Over on Mastodon’s flagship community, Mastodon.social, there are over 300,000 users. But despite the larger userbase, discussions are even less political. On the community’s local timeline, one user troubleshoots installing a Linux distribution. Another shares a news story about a man who tried to turn his home into a restaurant. A third links to an article about Gearbox Software’s Randy Pitchford. Here, Trump is not the sun; tech, gaming, and the occasional NSFW post largely prevail. It’s as if the outside world doesn’t exist.

Visiting Mastodon feels like strolling through the first “apolitical” social network. There’s no urgency to talk about the Trump administration’s policies or break down ongoing political events—but while that may seem like a pleasant reprieve, it’s actually an indication that all is not well on Mastodon.

Mastodon has long been hailed as a friendly and inclusive safe haven, one by and for people who want the far-right out of social media. But instead of losing the far-right, the platform has lost all politics entirely. That’s a problem for its queer userbase, who cannot be apolitical by nature. Being queer isn’t a hobby; it’s a political identity. And so while Mastodon seems fine on the surface, there is a much larger schism at play across the social media project regarding who should run it: its community, or its creator.

The creator
It’s impossible to understand Mastodon without considering its architect and understanding its structure. Eugen “Gargron” Rochko, a 25-year-old German programmer of Russian and Jewish heritage, began working on Mastodon while studying computer science at the German public university Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (or “University of Jena” in English). Rochko had experience with decentralized social networks as a teenager, and by 2010 he had already decided Twitter’s corporate-driven structure just wasn’t the proper way to handle online messaging. But it wasn’t until early 2016 that he decided to sit down and look at GNU social, a decentralized social network software and precursor of sorts to Mastodon.

Originally, Rochko considered making an app for GNU social, but he ultimately decided to start from scratch and create a custom implementation of GNU social’s protocol. This became Mastodon.

Simply put, Mastodon is a microblogging software where users can communicate with one another through character-limited messages, called “toots.” The project, which released to the public in October 2016, supports embeds for images, GIFs, and videos, and there’s even a “boost” system similar to Twitter’s retweets. But Mastodon’s biggest feature by far is its “fediverse.” Instead of throwing every account into a gigantic melting pot on one main website, Mastodon users can splinter off into dozens upon dozens of miniature Mastodon instances, which are servers governed by their own rules and with their own communities. These create one large federation, and while each of these instances—like Cybre.space—runs off of Mastodon’s software, they simultaneously exist separately from one another and as part of a larger whole. Instance users can interact with one another or blacklist other instances.

Mastodon is a free and open-source software that functions entirely on community contributions via GitHub. Over Discord, Rochko described Mastodon’s development flow: Features, changes, or fixes are submitted as pull requests on GitHub. A contributor codes the feature for Mastodon within the pull request. The pull request must pass through tests for review. But even if a pull request passes those tests, “only the owner of the project can decide” whether a pull request is merged, as Rochko puts it—although he has given that ability to “three or four more people than me” for redundancy’s sake (“in case I get hit by a bus,” as he says).

Since graduating in 2016, Rochko has given Mastodon his full attention. Today, he works on Mastodon full-time with support from over 900 patrons on Patreon (at the moment, he receives over $4,400 per month in total, or over $50,000 per year). But he’s far from the only person making Mastodon a reality, and many of its users take umbrage both with what features Rochko implements and how he credits the project’s contributors.

Mastodon’s former project manager, Maloki, founded a separative community that criticizes Rochko’s “Benevolent Dictator For Life” (BDFL) model for negatively impacting “already vulnerable and marginalized people.” Many queer critics feel Rochko implements features into Mastodon that make it easier for users to discover—and by extension, harass—people of color, queer posters, women, trans folks, and other marginalized groups.

The community
Decentralized social networking isn’t a new idea, nor is the “fediverse” as a concept. But the Mastodon project quickly became popular with queer and left-wing users after Trump’s election in November 2016. Most of Mastodon’s early users shared a common background: Some were furries, others worked in tech, some even developed video games. Many identified as queer and trans. As one Mastodon user said on Nov. 23, 2016: “Holy shit everyone Mastodon is basically gay furry-adjacent Twitter without risk of racist eggs, get here immediately and help us en-culture.”

After Trump’s election, Rochko paraded Mastodon as a Nazi-free alternative to Twitter, pointing out that Mastodon.social, which is personally administered by Rochko, bans Nazis. To this day, Mastodon is the progressive Twitter alternative, one repeatedly praised everywhere from Motherboard to Wired.

But Mastodon’s politics are more complicated than merely banning Nazis. White, queer, middle-class tech workers migrating to Mastodon treated it as an escape from the outside world. CWs effectively hid politics from plain sight, and to this day, the occasional Trump conversation is concealed and tagged under the warning “uspol.” This turned Mastodon into an apolitical space, one where users debate queer theory but try to keep the outside world’s happenings out.

Mastodon’s apolitical approach reflected larger problems at play on the platform. One early Mastodon adopter named “voz” left the platform in February 2017 after feeling increased alienation from Mastodon’s predominantly white userbase. Voz, who is a brown queer trans woman, considered Mastodon “a very white space” that gradually mirrored real-life versions of gentrification: White users made the service “more and more hostile to the Black and Brown users” that were among Mastodon’s initial adopters

“Whiteness insists on hiding itself, and a veneer of respectability given by ‘banning (overt) Nazis’ is really just a kind of fig leaf for the more mundane white supremacy at work there,” voz said via Keybase.

Read the rest from the Source:
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/mastodon-fediverse-eugen-rochko/

Mastodon/Pleroma/Rebased are part of the "fediverse." Meaning they share the core principles of the fediverse. With a little bit of reading, I got a better understanding of what the fediverse actually is, and how Mastodon/Pleroma/Rebased fit in.

Technically the fediverse “is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks“.

Let’s expand the explanation with an emphasis on what this means for a user:

The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social networks where a user can create a personal account on any specific instance but can connect to everyone else on every other instance.

Distributed instances is the key idea here.

The fediverse has many applications. There even is a reading sharing application (why didn’t I think of this?). But for now let’s focus on Mastodon/Pleroma. The fediverse microblog equivalent. Every user on any Mastodon/Pleroma instance can connect to any other user on any other Mastodon instance (mostly). And all these instances are run by different people.

Just like email The best analogy might be email. You can roll your own email server, use your company’s email server, or Gmail or Outlook or what have you. But — and this is important — you can send and receive email to and from anyone with a valid email address.

Just like you can with a Mastodon/Pleroma address, powered not by SMTP but the ActivityPub protocol.

The idea is brilliantly simple, and it is how the internet is actually supposed to — and always used to — work and it has lots of upsides.

UPSIDES Instances are run by individuals or groups who set their own rules. And thus every instance has a unique user experience or feel. There are many specific instances with distinct communities.

There is (theoretically) no real technical limit to the amount of users an instance can have*, but my guess is that most instances will top off somewhere to keep the instance manageable and moderation feasible. Just like most real life communities.

Because moderation is done per instance (implicitly by rules, explicitly by blocking users), this makes moderation distributed by default and thus scale-able. Did I mention it was clever?

OPEN:
Mastodon/Pleroma is open. In the realest sense. And I love the open web.

Everything on Mastodon/Pleroma is open and uses RSS: accounts, hashtags and more all are expressed as RSS feeds. I just love love love that part.

The openness comes with great upsides:

There is no ad-driven algorithm.

Don’t like the moderation rules on your instance? You can move your account to another instance.

Want to see the source code? Here you go. Want to run your own instance? You do you!

MOMENTUM:
Apart from not really understanding the fediverse, the other reason it didn’t click in 2017 is because no one I knew was there. Kind of important for a social media platform. But this classic chicken-egg problem got a gigantic kickstart with the recent influx as a result of the exodus from that.other.site. And Mastodon/Pleroma finally seems to have hit critical mass: there are enough people to make it interesting, thus attracting even more people. It really has come alive in the last few short weeks.

There are lots of curious people checking out the new thing, of course time will tell how many will stick around. And compared to other social media sites, the numbers are still really small, but gaining!

However I would think the end goal of Mastodon/Pleroma should (and is) not necessarily a question of replacing Twitter. Both will most likely co-exist — 44 billion dollar usually doesn’t evaporate just like that. But having Mastodon/Pleroma makes the world that much better, and it gives the users a choice.

I don’t think it is necessarily that people are fed up with new Twitter leadership (it’s only been a week, right?), but I do believe people are fed up with the Twitter experience in general drawing them to — finally viable — alternatives likes Mastodon/Pleroma.

And most of these experiences are things that Mastodon implicitly or explicitly addresses. Things like: moderation/Pleroma, accountability, community, ownership and resiliency.

But I also notice lots of Twitter people — mostly with large followings — are hesitant. I follow quite a few US tech people, and most seem bullish on Musk. Few are not. We’ll see.

Challenges:
1) USABILITY: Signing on, using Mastodon/Pleroma, understanding the Fediverse idea, finding & adding accounts. It’s not entirely intuitive, and thus a barrier.

2) PERFORMANCE: call it growth spurts. But most Mastodon instances are suffering greatly at the moment, hindering the user experience. Security: the openness also brings challenges!

3) TWITTER: IF (big if) Twitter somehow is able to address some of their issues this would provide a big pull force away from the Fediverse.

4) DISCOVERABILITY: where is everyone, where are interesting accounts, where are the people I know? Mastodon/Pleroma needs to do better than sharing spreadsheets for finding interesting accounts. But I do understand that this is the paradox of the open web. Having open, distributed content hinders discoveribilty (also see: podcasts).

Either way, the distributed character of Mastodon/Pleroma makes it here to stay. The only way is up for the foreseeable future. It’s pretty great to finally have an open, distributed real application, that is not blockchain.

That is what he wants you to believe but the real reason is that the language #Mastodon is written in, Ruby on Rails, works fine on smaller instances, but doesn't scale well for large instances so there is a drop off in performance the larger the user population becomes.

Ruby makes it easy to program for beginners, but just like #Python it wasn't designed with concurrency and performance in mind. It grew popular because its expressive power coupled with DRY conventions made it a very quick way to develop web software so long as you could throw more and more hardware at it and restart the server processes before they went south.

People who have switched from #Ruby to #Elixir (#Rebased & #Pleroma are like Mastodon but written in Elixir) just see incredible improvements of their hardware usage just drop right through the floor, and yes, Elixir is the best software language for high concurrency applications, until some high CPU operations need to be processed in another new programming language, better known as #Rust.

Please read:
https://discord.com/blog/using-rust-to-scale-elixir-for-11-million-concurrent-users

This debate was started when Mastodon.technology shut down due to server issues. Ash's Mastodon.technology has 23,000 participants & at that size, the problems inherent in Mastodon software show up. Ash's instance was not only locking up but started to become unstable due to the stress that the Ruby on Rails driven Mastodon platform puts on your server.

The choice of Ruby for the platform Mastodon (that is supposed to enable decentralization) does not make sense. Most Ruby apps have tens to hundreds of dependencies and require a build environment which immediately limits access to a smaller group of developers familiar with Ruby build environments and who have to debug their way out of any dependency hell.

Customization also becomes a problem. Mastodon, due to the inherent weaknesses of a Ruby on Rails app, wasn't heavily optimized. There is also no particular design in Mastodon itself to enable more transparency and prevent any arbitrary behavior and abuse of power.

The solution is Pleroma. Pleroma is less bloated than its alternative, Mastodon, having fewer software dependencies, and much less resource intensive. Pleroma implements the ActivityPub protocol, just like Mastodon, making Pleroma instances part of the wider Fediverse (an interconnected and decentralized network of independently operated servers).

Please tell us your thoughts?

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Description:
"We are fans of the genius Elon Musk! This is the unofficial social (not endorsed by Elon Musk) for those that hold to Elon's ideals of "Free Speech." No hate groups or hate rhetoric is allowed on Musk Social. We hold education and entrepreneurship as our ideals for a better future as Elon has demonstrated."