> Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive.
Sadly that's still an open issue that from time to time gets new input, but doesn't have a lot of traction. I feel like that's a big blind spot of Mastodon to this day and also basically forces people to stick to the largest instances that are less likely to go away, defeating the purpose of a distributed social network.
> More importantly, I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I'm really just not convinced social media is very useful. The main use I can see is very fast dispersal of information, but anything truly important will be distributed by mainstream media, and less important things will travel between small communities at a slower rate. So what are we left with exactly?
I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.
the problem is obviously, we can sorta filter out the bot spreading, but when people just use the avenue to spam whatever, it's a firehose only good for bullshit.
As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
Well that's kind of understandable, isn't it? In the USENET era, internet users were a subculture.
In 2026, almost everyone is an internet user.
It's kind of like saying "As someone whose first car was a Model T, I don't really consider the bulk of mainstream drivers today to be in any way 'my people'".
Exactly. If you were on USENET way back, you were a fucking nerd (lovingly). People romanticize that because it was very likely with any given group of people, they could strike up some kind of conversation, and they likely shared at least a few central values. Now the Internet is just outside with better moderation tools and curation.
I will say though the GP's comment:
> The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
That's just everybody, including them even if they refuse to admit it. I have fond memories of many a circus on USENET, on ICQ, on AOL chat rooms, on 4chan, on Digg, everything. They all have circuses with different sorts of clowns putting on different sorts of shows. But they're all equally value-free. Pretending otherwise is just wanking yourself.
> I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I can't figure out if this is me or if things really have changed. I was on early Reddit (before there were comments) and HN. There were always jerks and flamewars and pedants but it just feels like any thread I read on HN or Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal. I've watched long-time members of HN die and I can only think: do I really want to spend most of my life (or a good portion) doing this? It seems so empty.
What do people even get out of this? Is life this boring that people find it entertaining? I just don't get it anymore and I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted. I don't get any enjoyment out of it anymore and I feel like something is wrong with me because others do (only barely, this is insanity that we've adapted to).
2005 me thought things were going to be a lot more interesting, but things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space. (HN is social media - just trolling, the arguments of this are funny). There's gotta be something better. Do people even want better communities, would they recognize them, or is this the new normal? Is the optimism of 2005 dead, impossible to resurrect?
Over its course the Internet and Web took over just about all communications, including culturally anchoring things like TV, radio, and newspapers. The takeover accelerated with the rise of broadband, Facebook and smartphones, and is nearly complete. The whole world's here.
This means people who want to advertise, influence, or control large numbers of people also followed.
On my Instagram, sometimes I'll see local news, and the fake accounts are very obvious, they all post practically the same thing and all of their profiles follow similar patterns. Maybe this will go away when everything becomes ID-gated.
The optimism of 2005 was pre-smartphone, pre-social-media, and well before everyone's grandparents were constantly regurgitating political posts on Facebook.
> Do people even want better communities
Most people do not want to put in the work to make them, but they'll certainly join and passively let people run themselves into the ground entertaining them for free. It doesn't make sense to do all the work for lazy people unless you're just wanting to broadcast to the largest audience possible.
I agree. I think part of the problem is how recommendation algorithms have conditioned people to act online. Recommendation algorithms optimize for overall platform engagement to increase revenue, which tends to reward anti-social behavior like flamewars, conflict, ragebait, etc. It's rewarded simply because it creates more engagement than more positive content. Users in turn are conditioned to these algorithms because their anti-social behavior gets rewarded in the form of favorable algorithmic treatment. Now, I feel like the average social media user is just predisposed to act in those negative ways, which is why it's prevalent even on HN where the recommendation algorithms are not tuned in quite the same way.
Those forces weren't present on early social media, and have only gotten worse over time.
> Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal.
Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).
Eventually normal-adjacent people took over the site, which caused a boon of interesting topics and diverse opinions for a long while. The rude-to-be-funny thing never quite stopped, but when it went too far it was moderated or downvoted away.
I'd agree that things have been going downhill for many years now. The peak of genuine and quality engagement is long behind us. LLM-assisted comments are certainly not helping (I'm not talking about bots, I mean people who direct LLMs to write their comments).
> Is life this boring that people find it entertaining?
I don’t think it has to do with boredom or entertainment. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do push you into addictive behaviour on purpose, but I do think even HN (inadvertently) has addictive properties.
> I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted.
Pretty sure it’s the vibe. Plus, whatever we’re doing here is not really connecting with other people, it’s more akin to shouting at each other across a void. I do still frequent one old-style forum, and there I do see some connection between the regulars.
> things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space.
Once money became a factor, it was only a matter of time. Just the other day I was also thinking how I can’t even stand podcasts anymore, and all the ads are a major factor. Seems like every podcast is part of a network and it’s all about money. No one is just having fun anymore.
ActivityPub is the protocol and its the basis of the "fediverse". It's what underlies Meta's Threads, PeerTube (youtube alternative), Pixelfed (instagram alt), Lemmy (reddit alt), Nextcloud, and probably even Trump's TruthSocial! There's even a Wordpress and Ghost plugin to integrate into ActivityPub. Even Bluesky has previously discussed integrating with it
>Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive
I'm sure there is some technical excuse to why this is the case but just seems entirely broken that it can't just have the owner of the account provably broadcast they control both the original and the destinations and to redirect all posts.
I mean the actual thing that has value IS the posts and there would be less burden on people shutting down these servers if you were not destroying that work by doing so.
When a host goes away, where do you propose the posts previously hosted there now get hosted?
One option is for the poster's new host to have all the old posts uploaded ... how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated?
I'd genuinely be interested to hear your suggestions for how these technical issues could be resolved.
How about this: Duplicates of the old posts are created on a new host using some import/export mechanic, but they also contain a cryptographic signature proving ownership of the old posts (utilizing some secret only the original poster would have access to).
When a reference to a post becomes invalid because it's underlying host is gone, the other host holding those references tries to find new duplicate posts with the correct signature, and if it finds them, updates the broken old references to point to these new duplicates. If it doesn't find any duplicates with a matching signature, it leaves the references broken and has some cooldown before it tries to fix them again.
> There’s also the financial side. I’m very grateful to everyone who donated, but donations haven’t covered costs for a long time. I’ve had to shoulder most of the expenses, time, and responsibility myself.
One of the main issues of running a federated Mastodon instance with little to no money and donations will not cut it.
I picked the only instance I know that actually charges its users an insignificant amount ($20/year), thinking it'd give me some sense of security that it won't just go away one day. I've been paying for it for 3 years in a row without a second thought about it.
Anyways, on Aug 1st their pricing is increasing to $50/year (150% increase!) and now I'm far less convinced that the value it offers is worth the money.
This is why I host a personal instance. The overheard for moderation and costs is much lower. It also means if I tire of this, migrating my content is easier.
Nostr is just Mastodon or IRC with automatic multiposting.
Users must selfhost data for decentralized socials to work. One big problem with running a Twitter-like social media, Twitter itself included, is that hosting UGC is just risk without rewards. Users don't pay for the bandwidth, advertisers don't like competing quality UGC(they're possibly even angry about social media that it keeps undermining their "creatives" investment), just no one pays for it.
So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost. "First, connect to your spare Pi with a global IPv4 address" is out of question. Multihop P2P likely won't work either.
The tech is nice but sadly there's still not that many interesting accounts or content there unless you really want to read about Nostr and zaps all day.
I've tried many times, there's decent apps too these days (Primal) but unless you are heavily into that topic or crypto it's not very interesting.
he's taking his ball and going home, the financial aspect isn't load bearing (god damn claude ruined this) in his decision, it's a rationalization. if it were significant, he wouldn't refuse to hand it over to someone who still wants to do it.
A social media site isn't like a free software project. People are trusting you in a way that you cannot just hand over to another entity. (It's more like a SaaS business, in that way.) Some instances have managed it, but only to trusted community members, and never (to my knowledge) without some degree of strife.
EDIT: Once the server disappears, users who did nothing will lose the ability to delete their accounts later.
Without self-destruct, remote servers may retain cached profiles and posts indefinitely, but the original users will no longer control those objects. Mastodon created the command specifically to broadcast account deletions before a permanent shutdown and leave little cached material behind.
Is this desirable? This wipes other people's copies of their boosts, favourites, and bookmarked posts. If users want this behaviour, they can delete their own accounts.
It's possible to contact the instances who retain the copies of the data, and have them delete it. It's not like the Fediverse is some kind of blockchain, where data is replicated forever unless authorised parties delete it. (And deletion requests can still be sent out by whoever controls the domain, after the instance is gone.)
> Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive.
Sadly that's still an open issue that from time to time gets new input, but doesn't have a lot of traction. I feel like that's a big blind spot of Mastodon to this day and also basically forces people to stick to the largest instances that are less likely to go away, defeating the purpose of a distributed social network.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/12423
There's this if you want an automated way to download and repost your content: https://mastodoncontentmover.github.io/
It's also a source of power for mods.
> More importantly, I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I'm really just not convinced social media is very useful. The main use I can see is very fast dispersal of information, but anything truly important will be distributed by mainstream media, and less important things will travel between small communities at a slower rate. So what are we left with exactly?
I think small communities where people actually have to maintain a reputation are the future, and the past.
the problem is obviously, we can sorta filter out the bot spreading, but when people just use the avenue to spam whatever, it's a firehose only good for bullshit.
As someone whose first “social media” was USENET of the early 90s, and I suppose FidoNet before then, I don’t really consider the bulk of mainstream Internet users today to be in any way “my people”. The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
Today is the 12021th of September 1993.
that's because mainstream internet users today are everyone... I don't go for a walk and expect the world to be filled with "my people" either.
Well that's kind of understandable, isn't it? In the USENET era, internet users were a subculture.
In 2026, almost everyone is an internet user.
It's kind of like saying "As someone whose first car was a Model T, I don't really consider the bulk of mainstream drivers today to be in any way 'my people'".
Exactly. If you were on USENET way back, you were a fucking nerd (lovingly). People romanticize that because it was very likely with any given group of people, they could strike up some kind of conversation, and they likely shared at least a few central values. Now the Internet is just outside with better moderation tools and curation.
I will say though the GP's comment:
> The herd is endlessly mindless, shallow, bought with bread, and hungry for the circus.
That's just everybody, including them even if they refuse to admit it. I have fond memories of many a circus on USENET, on ICQ, on AOL chat rooms, on 4chan, on Digg, everything. They all have circuses with different sorts of clowns putting on different sorts of shows. But they're all equally value-free. Pretending otherwise is just wanking yourself.
Well, you certainly have the arrogance of a USENET poster I'll grant you that.
> I don’t enjoy how people interact on social media anymore
I can't figure out if this is me or if things really have changed. I was on early Reddit (before there were comments) and HN. There were always jerks and flamewars and pedants but it just feels like any thread I read on HN or Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal. I've watched long-time members of HN die and I can only think: do I really want to spend most of my life (or a good portion) doing this? It seems so empty.
What do people even get out of this? Is life this boring that people find it entertaining? I just don't get it anymore and I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted. I don't get any enjoyment out of it anymore and I feel like something is wrong with me because others do (only barely, this is insanity that we've adapted to).
2005 me thought things were going to be a lot more interesting, but things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space. (HN is social media - just trolling, the arguments of this are funny). There's gotta be something better. Do people even want better communities, would they recognize them, or is this the new normal? Is the optimism of 2005 dead, impossible to resurrect?
I don't think it's you.
Over its course the Internet and Web took over just about all communications, including culturally anchoring things like TV, radio, and newspapers. The takeover accelerated with the rise of broadband, Facebook and smartphones, and is nearly complete. The whole world's here.
This means people who want to advertise, influence, or control large numbers of people also followed.
On my Instagram, sometimes I'll see local news, and the fake accounts are very obvious, they all post practically the same thing and all of their profiles follow similar patterns. Maybe this will go away when everything becomes ID-gated.
The optimism of 2005 was pre-smartphone, pre-social-media, and well before everyone's grandparents were constantly regurgitating political posts on Facebook.
> Do people even want better communities
Most people do not want to put in the work to make them, but they'll certainly join and passively let people run themselves into the ground entertaining them for free. It doesn't make sense to do all the work for lazy people unless you're just wanting to broadcast to the largest audience possible.
I agree. I think part of the problem is how recommendation algorithms have conditioned people to act online. Recommendation algorithms optimize for overall platform engagement to increase revenue, which tends to reward anti-social behavior like flamewars, conflict, ragebait, etc. It's rewarded simply because it creates more engagement than more positive content. Users in turn are conditioned to these algorithms because their anti-social behavior gets rewarded in the form of favorable algorithmic treatment. Now, I feel like the average social media user is just predisposed to act in those negative ways, which is why it's prevalent even on HN where the recommendation algorithms are not tuned in quite the same way.
Those forces weren't present on early social media, and have only gotten worse over time.
> Reddit is just full of the worst behavior. People think nothing of just being incredibly, incredibly rude to strangers and ther insights are often banal.
Reddit grew up as a community of edgelords. Trying to be funny by exaggeratedly insulting others is just how it was. Think a community of Ben Shapiros. Coming to the site as an outsider could be brutal until you got used to ignoring it (or engaging, if you're into it).
Eventually normal-adjacent people took over the site, which caused a boon of interesting topics and diverse opinions for a long while. The rude-to-be-funny thing never quite stopped, but when it went too far it was moderated or downvoted away.
I'd agree that things have been going downhill for many years now. The peak of genuine and quality engagement is long behind us. LLM-assisted comments are certainly not helping (I'm not talking about bots, I mean people who direct LLMs to write their comments).
People take example from their political and cultural (artists, sportspersons) leaders.
You’re not alone. Plenty of us feel the same way.
> Is life this boring that people find it entertaining?
I don’t think it has to do with boredom or entertainment. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok do push you into addictive behaviour on purpose, but I do think even HN (inadvertently) has addictive properties.
> I can't figure out if the novelty is gone (connecting people is overrated if it leads to...this), it's my age, or if the vibe really has shifted.
Pretty sure it’s the vibe. Plus, whatever we’re doing here is not really connecting with other people, it’s more akin to shouting at each other across a void. I do still frequent one old-style forum, and there I do see some connection between the regulars.
> things haven't really evolved towards anything positive in the forum/soc media space.
Once money became a factor, it was only a matter of time. Just the other day I was also thinking how I can’t even stand podcasts anymore, and all the ads are a major factor. Seems like every podcast is part of a network and it’s all about money. No one is just having fun anymore.
> There's gotta be something better.
There is. It’s friends offline.
Question: Is there some kind of official protocol for Mastodon?
Reason I ask, is if whoever is in charge have considered to support moving posts and interactions from one server to another.
The protocol is ActivityPub and the feature you suggest is being considered as FEP 1580.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/1580/...
ActivityPub is the protocol and its the basis of the "fediverse". It's what underlies Meta's Threads, PeerTube (youtube alternative), Pixelfed (instagram alt), Lemmy (reddit alt), Nextcloud, and probably even Trump's TruthSocial! There's even a Wordpress and Ghost plugin to integrate into ActivityPub. Even Bluesky has previously discussed integrating with it
Yes, it's called ActivityPub. I'm surprised it doesn't support migrating posts.
>Please note that Mastodon can move your followers, but it can’t transfer your old posts or uploaded media to your new account. If you want to keep a copy, download an archive
I'm sure there is some technical excuse to why this is the case but just seems entirely broken that it can't just have the owner of the account provably broadcast they control both the original and the destinations and to redirect all posts.
I mean the actual thing that has value IS the posts and there would be less burden on people shutting down these servers if you were not destroying that work by doing so.
The posts, when posted live on the host.
The user can download their posts.
When a host goes away, where do you propose the posts previously hosted there now get hosted?
One option is for the poster's new host to have all the old posts uploaded ... how then to previous other posts that point at them, or reply to them, get updated?
I'd genuinely be interested to hear your suggestions for how these technical issues could be resolved.
How about this: Duplicates of the old posts are created on a new host using some import/export mechanic, but they also contain a cryptographic signature proving ownership of the old posts (utilizing some secret only the original poster would have access to).
When a reference to a post becomes invalid because it's underlying host is gone, the other host holding those references tries to find new duplicate posts with the correct signature, and if it finds them, updates the broken old references to point to these new duplicates. If it doesn't find any duplicates with a matching signature, it leaves the references broken and has some cooldown before it tries to fix them again.
> There’s also the financial side. I’m very grateful to everyone who donated, but donations haven’t covered costs for a long time. I’ve had to shoulder most of the expenses, time, and responsibility myself.
One of the main issues of running a federated Mastodon instance with little to no money and donations will not cut it.
I picked the only instance I know that actually charges its users an insignificant amount ($20/year), thinking it'd give me some sense of security that it won't just go away one day. I've been paying for it for 3 years in a row without a second thought about it.
Anyways, on Aug 1st their pricing is increasing to $50/year (150% increase!) and now I'm far less convinced that the value it offers is worth the money.
This is why I host a personal instance. The overheard for moderation and costs is much lower. It also means if I tire of this, migrating my content is easier.
this is why nostr beats mastodon. when the operator pitches a fit and shuts down, your community survives.
Nostr is just Mastodon or IRC with automatic multiposting.
Users must selfhost data for decentralized socials to work. One big problem with running a Twitter-like social media, Twitter itself included, is that hosting UGC is just risk without rewards. Users don't pay for the bandwidth, advertisers don't like competing quality UGC(they're possibly even angry about social media that it keeps undermining their "creatives" investment), just no one pays for it.
So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost. "First, connect to your spare Pi with a global IPv4 address" is out of question. Multihop P2P likely won't work either.
The tech is nice but sadly there's still not that many interesting accounts or content there unless you really want to read about Nostr and zaps all day.
I've tried many times, there's decent apps too these days (Primal) but unless you are heavily into that topic or crypto it's not very interesting.
The author doesn't sound like they are pitching a fit to me.
maybe i read more into it. i got put off by his refusal to hand it off. he can quit, no qualms there. but not handing it over? that seems petty, imo.
I feel like if you can ignore the bitcoin-bros, Nostr is a better, more lightweight design that doesn't suffer from centralized (localized) shutdowns.
he's taking his ball and going home, the financial aspect isn't load bearing (god damn claude ruined this) in his decision, it's a rationalization. if it were significant, he wouldn't refuse to hand it over to someone who still wants to do it.
A social media site isn't like a free software project. People are trusting you in a way that you cannot just hand over to another entity. (It's more like a SaaS business, in that way.) Some instances have managed it, but only to trusted community members, and never (to my knowledge) without some degree of strife.
don't forget to `tootctl self-destruct`
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/tootctl/#self-destruct
EDIT: Once the server disappears, users who did nothing will lose the ability to delete their accounts later.
Without self-destruct, remote servers may retain cached profiles and posts indefinitely, but the original users will no longer control those objects. Mastodon created the command specifically to broadcast account deletions before a permanent shutdown and leave little cached material behind.
Is this desirable? This wipes other people's copies of their boosts, favourites, and bookmarked posts. If users want this behaviour, they can delete their own accounts.
They can't delete their accounts after the server hosting the account shuts down.
It's possible to contact the instances who retain the copies of the data, and have them delete it. It's not like the Fediverse is some kind of blockchain, where data is replicated forever unless authorised parties delete it. (And deletion requests can still be sent out by whoever controls the domain, after the instance is gone.)