So in the last month of being a new Mastodon admin I've seen: (1) a popular instance wipe its entire database and (2) a popular instance's operator ragequit and take the server with them.
Definitely an education in mastodon failure modes!
My sense is that the decision to become a Mastodon admin comes with some responsibility to plan for continuity... the broader Mastodon community suffers when there is no plan or a lack of effort to carry it out.
@lawremipsum even if we secretly think it looks like a green wall with two black lines
@hfrazey and destroy this magnificent creation 
? I shan't.
@lawremipsum ok your mural is nice even if it its only two black lines on a green wall
@hfrazey @lawremipsum minimalist mural!!!!!!!!
@t54r4n1 @lawremipsum I think they are VERY NICE lines. And the wall is VERY green. pls don't rage quit
@lawremipsum well, who knows the whole mastodon team might quit one day and leave everything behind~
Or a instance admin went under the bus, who knows.
@lawremipsum I've just been in a big ol' thread about this - being part of a cooperative or ensuring that some sort of society has access seems like the ideal long-term stability strategy, though it's a hard one to get sorted.
@JubalBarca it's definitely something that needs to grow/scale with the instance. The more users you have the greater the responsibility and the necessary planning.
@lawremipsum Yeah, very much so, and I'm sure there's space for many different sizes of instance :)
@lawremipsum poor IT continuity happens all the time even at medium and large businesses. Redundancy, disaster recovery, and IT management are not taught to all admins, and uptime is a poor measure of resiliency 😕
I don't mean to imply it's a simple problem, either. Will anyone want to take over my duties if (when?) I want to quit? Who knows. I'd be willing to commit to submit my server to a mastodon community-run receivership if none of my users could/would step up... If such a thing existed.
Or I guess we can accept that churn is part of the ecosystem and keep finding ways to make the churn easier on users...
@lawremipsum this reminds me of the time i walked by https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7947929,-122.4023455,3a,90y,317.49h,132.89t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sCtUqmfyOG51UWIECoK0mkw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
(a redwood park by the transamerica building in san francisco) and remarked, "aren't those trees going to fuck up the foundations in 100 years?" the rejoinder was that "no one plans for 100 years from now."
@t54r4n1 @lawremipsum don't worry, they'll cut them down before that happens
@earthtopus @lawremipsum ok but imagine the line out the DOOR to be a treesitter for those trees. wow
@t54r4n1 @lawremipsum well, perhaps an earthquake will take the buiding out first, then
@earthtopus @lawremipsum ah! and collapse its rubble on the trees. two birds, one stone.
@lawremipsum So far I like the concept of this distributed social network...but I think the Mastadon software could be self hosted, as a service on individual workstations. Then when someone cancels...it has no affect. There could still be the fediverse...maybe a few locals you subscribe to, and your own identity is kept on your machine. Personally I already had witches.town blocked. :( It's easy when the group was based on an ideology I already had problems with.
Agreed, that sort of juvenile behavior is incredibly damaging to the platform.
Maybe a ranking system can be employed where instances with certain professional characteristics are identified.
@jeff that would be interesting to see... Similar to the security observatory grading, but for continuity plans / characteristics of institutional discipline.
Is it possible to share admin responsibilities? Surely there's a more robust way of organizing the community here. Right?
@jacobcammack Definitely possible. But the way a lot of instances start as one person's project—even the promotional text on joinmastodon says "anyone," which implies singular—effort to plan for "what comes after/in case I lose intetest" is easy for that person to put off. Pretty much every other thing about being an admin will seem more pressing.
So yeah, definitely more of a psych and sociology problem than a "tech" problem.
Hmmm... so it sounds like nothing too much to worry about huh? This sort of thing will evolve naturally as the ecosystem of instances mature and develop. Yeah?
@jacobcammack I half-agree? I think some amount of churn and uncertainty is inevitable, but also that it could discourage wider adoption... At that point I guess it depends if that's considered a bug or a feature.
Making individual profiles more portable & making porting to a new instance as painless as possible could mitigate some uncertainty.
(Really the only thing missing that I can tell is letting someone upload their archive to a new instance, and maybe something to automate a migration)
@lawremipsum @jacobcammack it'd probably be good if there were some kind of built-in cryptographic mechanism for verifying that a migration between instances is actually the same person, but i guess anything like that is a giant can of UI worms.
re: the whole question, i think what everbody's saying about how we need to work on the social problems too - the unsexy stuff of governance and coops and such - is spot on.
@lawremipsum @jacobcammack my take is that we need both:
a) more streamlining of how easy it is to run a small instance for you and a few friends
b) more of a norm where the big stable instances have a formal shared admin & funding model.
Agreed. Running an instance should be way more streamlined. I haven't tried yet but feel ready to do so. I want to break things.
@jacobcammack @brennen lol I broke mine right away and it's never been completely fixed.
@brennen @lawremipsum It's interesting to think we could get a wide variance of ecosystems here and the ways they interact with one another could also have a lot of variance. Fungus has different protocol for interacting with bacteria than with other fungus I'm sure. ;)
I want to play with a variety of governance models and watch stuff break, evolve. I think we need a better UI for how we can actually BUILD something together.
Key word: BUILD. Too much amnesia here. (See: "Twitter")
@lawremipsum Would those features (being able to upload one's archive to a new instance and automating a migration) be hard to write?
@jacobcammack outside my ability to say—I only dabble and haven't contributed to an open source project—but having thought about it some more I can imagine reasons why it might be feasible but create new problems developers wouldn't want to create.
@lawremipsum @jacobcammack
If bigger instances start closing down too often due to single admins quitting (for whatever reasons) I guess people that still like the platform will start looking for more details about the admin team (i.e. more than 1) and their policies for the next home they choose.
@lawremipsum Especially if you plan to run a big public instance. Many people seem to underestimate the fact that hundreds, if not thousands of users could be relying on you to keep a chunk of their social precense online
@lawremipsum This is a major reason I'm a bit nervous about starting an instance as an individual admin rather than as part of a team/community.
Heh. Just thinking on this brings back memories of when there were more IRC servers and all the goatse' fuckery that went on with those in similar fashion.
@lawremipsum Reminds me a bit of the shit that used to happen on IRC back in the day, TBH. The nice thing about a federated service is that it provides structural limits to that kind of dumb shite.
@lawremipsum which instance was 1?
@catalina That was Mastodon.rocks https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99693889843063970
@lawremipsum ah, yikes
@lawremipsum Previous mastodon.rocks user here, account and connections lost forever. No big deal, but shows I was (am) *not* the least in control of my data. Please advise 😃
@lawremipsum It's not that different from being just an admin of a community or a webpage. It's more difficult than most people realize.
@lawremipsum can you name the instances?
@tuxicoman (1) was mastodon.rocks and (2) was witches.town
@lawremipsum oh, quite big instances....
@lawremipsum if we tell you your mural is nice will you promise not to ragequit