mastodon.technology

» see mastodon.technology as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

The fediverse is not one website, it is a few thousand of them agreeing to pass messages, and each one is somebody's server bill and somebody's inbox of complaints. mastodon.technology was Ash Furrow's. It went up in April 2017, during the first wave of people trying Mastodon, with a scope you could fit in a sentence: an instance for people interested in technology, with the explicit note that conversation was not restricted to technology, "because tech folks shouldn't be limited to technology either".

It became one of the better-known addresses on the network. F-Droid kept its project account there. The code of conduct was adapted from another instance's rather than written from scratch, the blocklist was published openly in a GitHub repository, and both of those choices mark an admin who had thought about moderation as infrastructure instead of as a mood. For five and a half years it worked.

Then in October 2022 Furrow posted that it was closing, and the post is unusually direct about why. The server had been going intermittently unavailable for reasons he could not find, and it had grown past what one person could administer. A member of his family had been diagnosed with a terminal illness. Then the sentence that does the most damage to anyone reading it who also runs something: "I've come to resent the work I have volunteered to do."

~ the dossier ~

~ the census ~

Mastodon servers publish their own numbers at a public address, which means a dead instance can be measured exactly rather than estimated. The last reading of mastodon.technology, captured on 23 November 2022, eight days before the end: 23,561 accounts holding 1,290,577 posts, exchanged with 23,140 other servers. It was running Mastodon 3.5.3, and the registration flag reads `false`.

That last number is the one worth sitting with. Twenty-three thousand people, and twenty-three thousand peer servers, which is to say this one machine was in contact with essentially the whole federated network.

~ an attribute on an input element ~

The signup form was still sitting on the front page on 1 November 2022, fields and labels and all. Every field in it carries `disabled="disabled"` in the markup. Read-only mode on a Mastodon instance is not a banner across the top of the site, it is an HTML attribute, and it is legible in the archive to anyone who opens the source of a capture.

~ the worst possible month ~

Elon Musk completed the Twitter purchase on 27 October 2022. What followed was the largest arrival of new users the fediverse had ever seen, by an order of magnitude, and it broke instances everywhere. Admins posted about disk space at midnight and put up donation pages for hardware, while volunteers found themselves moderating ten times their previous load. The entire argument for a decentralized social network was being tested in public for the first time.

mastodon.technology spent that month shutting down. The announcement predates the acquisition closing by about three weeks, so this was not a decision made in reaction to the wave, which somehow makes it worse to read. One of the best-run technology instances on the network had already reached the end of what its administrator could give, and it reached it right as the thing he had been volunteering for turned into the place everyone was going.

~ what one person carries ~

I am a computer engineer and I have run things for other people in my spare time, which is the only part of this I can speak to honestly, and it is enough. The federated model moves the costs of a social network from a company to a few thousand individuals who absorb them personally, and the model works right up until one of them gets tired or gets bad news from a doctor. Furrow gave the Mastodon Server Covenant's required notice, kept the server federating in read-only mode for a month so people could migrate, and closed it on 1 December 2022. By the 5th the address was a bare redirect. Everything on it had to be moved by hand, by its owners, one account at a time.

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