Have a look at NextGen and Maya And The Three on Netflix. Both were produced with Blender as the central 3D tool by my old employer, Tangent Animation. We delivered Maya in 2021; Blender has been in production for years.
Tangent produced feature animation, but also was working on an asset manager product, which is now owned by Autodesk after Tangent went under. Our animators doubled as dog food tasters. I mention this because the execs were 100% very much out to make a profit from this enterprise - I myself was living my wet dream because I am Free Software zealot, but they were looking to turn a profit from it all, and even these fiscally-motivated folks were frequently heard to say that "Blender is the future" because everyone there understood that that is the case.
I was once managing a few large file servers, with bog standard users as well as devs using a pretty complex directory tree of "assets".
There was a pretty high-up, specific directory level, which was where the ZFS file servers were given their different loads to handle. This was a directory level where new directories were created rarely (99% at the start of the project).
For reasons of money as well as speed, I asked that the server admins (ie. me) be the ones to create any further directories needed at that particular level. The head dev refused to entertain the idea of not being able to create directories anywhere he wanted at any time, and therefore, a new system was brought in at five-figure costs in order to make the file servers into a large abstracted blob that users never had to think about the complexities of managing.
I was given an opportunity to exit the IT dept and become a Python dev and I took it, shortly before that system came in, because it caused many problems which were much worse than needing to have an admin create a directory for you maybe once or twice, and the evident ignorance of everyone I spoke to at the vendor made it very clear ahead of time that it would.
This was not the only such massive expenditure on a toxic boondoggle in the name of "simplicity" that I witnessed.
Mastodon is an actual social network at the moment, but the ongoing flood of Twitter emigres have triggered a culture war that is getting some really funky permutations.
"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."
The author did not leave Mastodon, they switched to the largest instance:
> Mastodon's biggest problem is that the majority of Mastodon instance administrators are unqualified, and unsuspecting Mastodon users become the victims of shoddy administration ... Despite Mastodon's ambition to be a decentralized network, I can't recommend joining an instance other than the biggest one, mastodon.social.
This fellow wants the same experience from a completely different system, seems to me, which is also the reason that the Twitter people have had so much static from the Mastodon people - it's a different place, with different things going on, and very different assumptions.
All of the negative writing I've seen has basically been different versions of "I have expectations as a user, and Mastodon has not met those expectations, so I can't recommend it" with no further examination. No questioning of their own assumptions and expectations, no respect for a culture that has evolved over years by its own bootstraps while they languished in comfy gardens run by evil autocrats, very rarely even a clear explanation of the differences between Mastodon and other networks.
Mastodon is not "another social network" that comes from the same place as the others. It comes from hating the others and wanting something different from t them. These writers who come from this "why, Mastodon, should I bestow my precious attention onto your platform rather than these others?" as though Mastodon had something to gain from capturing your attention.
It does not; Mastodon rejects the attention economy, so in fact, everyone should be asking themselves what kind of quality content they have to bring. Mastodon does not care about your attention, it only wants to provide you with the tools to find things that your attention craves with no fascism or vile spam or propagandizing by billionaires.
Ask not what your social media can do for you - ask what you can do for your social network.
You seem to have a reading comprehension problem that somehow hasn't been mitigated by the previous reply to you. You're making this about Mastodon vs. other social networks, but that's a false dichotomy.
To clarify:
1. I'm not leaving Mastodon.
2. I'm not going back to Twitter.
3. I'm not recommending Twitter.
4. I'm not switching to another social network.
5. I'm not recommending another social network. I even stated in the article that Threads is not a viable alternative to Mastodon.
I migrated from one Mastodon instance to another. My complaint was that too many Mastodon instance administrators are incompetent or irresponsible.
Moreover, I do expect any service to not experience unexpected data loss. Is that not a reasonable assumption?
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.
>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.
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:
> 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.
I'm more indifferent than hostile, but you don't need to become an admin. You do, however, have to find the instance that's right for you, and that will take effort.
The only thing I would have a problem with them doing with my data is exploiting it; the idea that they delete it after a period is a selling point for me if it's anything.
> You do, however, have to find the instance that's right for you, and that will take effort.
This is why I said, "I can't recommend joining an instance other than the biggest one, mastodon.social." I learned this through harsh trial and error. You claim that's not the answer, but for most people it is.
> the idea that they delete it after a period is a selling point for me if it's anything
Good for you, but many people disagree vehemently.
On the other hand, as a user, you have no idea whether the admin has enabled the content cache retention period, and if so, how long it is. So even if it's a "selling point" for you, there's no visible option to "buy".
Also, I don't think you're understanding the technical details of the content cache retention period. It's not deleting your data per se; it's deleting posts from other Mastodon instances. Some of those may be DMs that people sent to you. Some of those may be replies written to you. Some may be posts that you replied to. So I'm not sure what exactly you take to be a selling point.
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.
> 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.)
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
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."
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.
See, people need to remember something. The 4th of the 12 truths of Networking applies to sysadminry.
Rfc 1925
(4) Some things in life can never be fully appreciated nor understood unless experienced firsthand. Some things in networking can never be fully understood by someone who neither builds commercial networking equipment nor runs an operational network.
If you want to know why X did Y, you have to sample. You have to become literate, you have to try.
This smells like corporate propaganda to me. Notice how there is no "about us" page that tells you who created the page, who funds them, absolutely no way to attach this site to any living human?
Well, considering the message that the website seems to be promoting that's not that surprising. It does read pretty evangelical, but the laws themselves are something I wouldn't have known about otherwise so at least it serves as a jumping-off point for further research.
Reads to me like a site by some group of billionaires or other serving some billionaire's agenda. I'm NDP by nature but Trudeau has earned my strong support at the federal level, and partly because he got facebook to surrender the news from their site, and is highlighting the unworkability of using corporate platforms with algorithms for news.
His father was a wily one too. This is just people with ridiculous policies trying to whip up the hate in hopes that the hate will take him down this time, after failing to do so every other time.
> Supply chains stretched so taut that a single disruption shut the whole world down.
Saying "single disruption" here is almost as bad as saying the dinosaurs were wiped out by a single rock. It's not a matter of the number of underlying causes but a matter of the scale of the disruption.
My recollection is that there was an intentional limit on what parts were compatible with what ventilators, essentially DRM or filter tying/bundling. This denied healthcare facilities the flexibility to pair consumable components from third-party manufacturers with a specific ventilator.
This goes above and beyond basic market function, though yes, I suppose you could say that it was rooted at some level in capitalist short-term-profit-maximising practices.
Far as I'm concerned, medical devices should be "nationalized" to the degree that all designs are 100% open from the most easily-sourceable parts available and must be 100% interoperable. DRM should be outlawed rather than enshrined.
Perhaps they should design the machines so that they are user-serviceable.
This was the default at one point. Look at the manual for any home appliance from the 1950s.
The difficulty in replacing an iphone screen is not that it's hard to plug it into its receptacle - the difficulty is in acquiring a part (they won't sell them) and then in opening the device, which requires skill and a specialized tool in pretty much every case.
Maybe, hold them together with small screws, instead of that.
>"but then it will weigh an extra .237oz!"Shut up.
It's not fair to dismiss this argument. The vast majority of people don't care if it's user serviceable and will prefer that the device weighs .237oz less than be user serviceable. This isn't some niche market we are talking about, we are 16 years after the release of the first iPhone. My account on this forum is 11 years old, and this point has been argued for almost that entire time. As much as been hand wringing about customers not caring about .237oz in favor of user serviceability, there have been countless smartphones released that people didn't buy. "Shut up" isn't a product strategy. "Perhaps they should design something users don't want" is a silly statement at this point.
Exactly. The whole "modular phone" and related phenomena are effectively nerd porn and against 50+ years of industry progress towards cheaper, better, denser integration.
I’m glad that the nerd porn exists because I do care about sustainability but operating on Apple’s scale means those devices are a fantasy for the majority of people. Apple’s approach seems more sustainable considering how many claims they can continue to make. Maybe it’s all marketing but I can’t find anyone that invalidates their claims without mischaracterizing them (as this article does a ton).
One way, is to make it non-user serviceable, the other, to make it user serviceable.
Now, which do you spend immense sums researching? Which people do you hire for your company? And after you spend years down this path, tooling, hiring, designing, someone says "the environment counts, it should be user serviceable".
Well of course, with billions spent designing, and predicated upon current methods, AND with all the people you hire experts in closed, non-servicable design?
What sort of answer will you get?
Apple, and others, the entire industry, has created this industry to be like this.
If the same R&D was spent on user serviceable, it would happen. Cheaply. Easily.
So of course it's "very hard" to do user serviceable, because no one knows how, and no one has the experience, and no one is researching it.
And no, these little firms working at it, don't equate to Apple working at it.
It may not be on purpose, but to claim it isn't possible is unfair.
You know if the auto industry was left to its own devices, it would still be claiming electric cars weren't feasible too, right? And from their perspective, they were not! Because without billions in research, and iteration, it wasn't.
Just like with Apple and user serviceable parts.
Just as with cars, and bags, and everything else, we should legislate such requirements. So all players in the market must comply.
This seems a little disingenuous. The entire reason that user-serviceable devices aren't possible is that the tooling required to service them becomes more and more specialized as the devices get smaller. It's not a matter of whether or not they can make user-serviceable parts (which why I replied to a comment about things like Fairphone and other modular/serviceable phones) but whether they can scale that and the reality is that 1) it doesn't scale without being so expensive that users can't afford the devices and 2) most users just don't care about user serviceability. So the idea that there are 2 ways to build is a false dichotomy.
It's not a question of possibilities. It's a question of trade-offs. It just does not sell (or at least hasn't.) Integrating everything often equates to less cost, less weight, less materials, less power use, less thickness, more reliability, more water resistance, more performance etc. for the vast majority of the users who have voted with their wallets. And to a nontrivial degree there are physical constraints that dictate this not just marketing and R&D spending (do you want to have replaceable SODIMMs in your iPhone?) I bet the average user likes the idea of modularity and user serviceability but wouldn't want to pay $100 extra for modularity in their $1k iPhone. They are likely more willing to purchase peace of mind through insurance, ala AppleCare+, than to purchase serviceability.
But sure we can keep pretending modularity is free and therefore of obviously a nonnegative option value to the user.
>There have been no options besides that paradigm.
Fairphone has been around for 8 years. There was the Shift 6m. The Galaxy line was highly repairable up until S5. We are past the point of speculating if its "perfectly doable". People don't want them. To say there were "no options" is ludicrous.
>You have the scent of someone with Apple stock.
I guess it's easier to call me a shill than to accept the almost 20 years of failure for smartphones in this aspect. It's easier to pretend that there were no options than people not actually buying them.
Tangent produced feature animation, but also was working on an asset manager product, which is now owned by Autodesk after Tangent went under. Our animators doubled as dog food tasters. I mention this because the execs were 100% very much out to make a profit from this enterprise - I myself was living my wet dream because I am Free Software zealot, but they were looking to turn a profit from it all, and even these fiscally-motivated folks were frequently heard to say that "Blender is the future" because everyone there understood that that is the case.
Expect more Blender movies.