Join Mastodon

[Nick]

Hello @Emerodh or who may be in position to get this rolling,

AFAIK the PPEU does not have a Mastodon or other Fediverse account (yet).
It would be very good if we could join the Fediverse with a micro-blogging platform.

What is Mastodon(or the Fediverse)?

TLDR: A free(as in FreeSoftware), decentralized Social Media network.
The Fediverse is a general term to descripe this network. Mastodon being one of the biggest platforms in there. PeerTube is also relatively well known for instance(we the PPEU also have our own instance here: Peertube of European Pirates)

Why Mastodon?

As we have seen with Social Media Doesn’t Want What’s Best For You : The Case of Musk and AfD | European Pirate Party, election interference and in recent news: US sanctions it has become even more evident that we need (to use) independent alternatives to foreign services. In addition to our usual opinions and knowledge about BigTech etc.
The Fediverse is the obvious choice here, for micro-blogging Mastodon would be easy to use but Frendica could also be worth taking a look(it’s what the PPDE uses(and thanks to ActivityPub all services within the Fediverse can talk to each other).)

Why not x, Bluesky, etc

We could/can use those in additon(for now), but have to keep in mind that those services aren’t free. And BlueSky isnt a decentralized Twitter alternative, since it is NOT decentralized which is why censorship or the recent outage was and is still possible.
Which is not to say that we shouldn’t use BlueSky etc, but just that we have to acknowledge and in the hopefully near future also prioritize the Fediverse(or other Networks if appropriate, however as of now I am afraid that the Fediverse is not only the best but also the biggest alternative(>1Mio active and 12Mio total users) we have got).

I understand that we might not have that many resources right now, however consider this:

1. Just have some presence there, so an audience can grow and that we show interest
2. A few posts would be an achievable low hanging fruit, and we would a) be ready for future outages etc and b) can point ppl to it who do not use other “traditional” and centralized social media apps.
3. There are already plenty of Pirates there, as mentioned before the PPDE has a Frendica Server(also Mastodon and multiple PeerTube servers), the Belgian and Dutch also have Mastodon servers and there are some other general servers as well. So you/we wouldn’t have to host anything new your-/ourself actually.
4. From that point onwards it would be very easy to scale up, post more or less, reply to posts, engage etc.

Let’s show ppl that we understand, life and use the future

Best Regards and if you have any questions or need assistance dont hesitate to contact me,
Nick Newman
responsible for Social Media in Oberbayern

cc @Bastian

[Emerodh]

Hello, thank you for the suggestion, it makes sense!

Would you be able to help us budget it? How much would it cost to operate a PPEU account/server ? Let’s say as a baseline that the server would not host any private accounts, maybe only a few official PPEU ones.

Cheers,

Florian

[macfranc]

@Emerodh

Would you be able to help us budget it? How much would it cost to operate a PPEU account/server ? Let’s say as a baseline that the server would not host any private accounts, maybe only a few official PPEU ones.

Hi, I can already give you some answers based on the experience I have had in these years.

I currently directly manage three instances:

1. poliverso.org, the second most active Friendica instance of the Fediverso (240 active users in the last month)
2. poliversity.it, an Italian instance based on a fork of Mastodon that allows you to write long and formatted texts (75 active users)
3. feddit.it, the first Italian instance based on Lemmy, which would be a sort of Reddit (180 active users)

I am also a moderator of the largest Italian Mastodon instance, mastodon.uno (6,000 active users and more than 70,000 overall) and of fedimercatino.it, the first Italian Flohmarkt instance, a sort of ebay oriented to reuse, for which I am collaborating on the development of an Android app, Flohra.

To manage the two instances poliverso.org and poliversity.it on the same server, I spend about 30 euros per month just for hosting, even if this budget is the result of very stringent saving strategies. The system management required several man-days for the initial installation, the 4 migrations done so far and some scheduled maintenance or impromptu maintenance, due to some moments of overload.

I also manage several accounts of the Fediverse, including:

• informapirata (present on Mastodon, on Friendica and on my federated wordpress blog). The Mastodon account has about 7000 followers and is the most followed pirate account of the Fediverse
• the official account of Pirati.io, the ordinary Italian member of the PPEU, with more than 1000 followers
• the pirate information account “PiratePost” which with about 1000 followers reports news on pirates from all over the world.

The time to manage these accounts is not much, but it still requires some activity windows every day to create content, follow conversations and respond.

Options to enter the Fediverse:

1. Create an account

Mastodon is the easiest choice, even if Mastodon is a system limited in number of characters and total lack of formatting of the published posts.
Creating a Friendica account would be more suitable for writing long posts, tapping into the RSS feeds of the PPEU website, managing federated events and, above all, for the possibility of managing an account in collective mode, without distributing passwords but delegating other Friendica accounts to manage the collective account. Finally, if I remember correctly, Michael Vogel, one of the developers of Friendica is also a member of the German Pirate Party.
There is also the possibility of federating the PPEU website, activating the free plugin developed by Matthias Pfefferle for Automattic.

2. Create a PPEU Mastodon instance, dedicated only to the institutional account or with the possibility of limiting the registration to MEPs or to all pirate deputies elected in the member states. Eventually, it could also be possible to allow registration to all members of national pirate parties.

3. As point 2) but using Friendica

If you need more information, I am available

Best regards,

Francesco

[Nick]

@Emerodh

How much would it cost to operate a PPEU account/server ? Let’s say as a baseline that the server would not host any private accounts, maybe only a few official PPEU ones.

What @macfranc says, or if you rent a managed mastodon server here for instance I would estimate(I am not a Mastodon admin) at least around 10-20€+tax,
but maybe you might not need to host your own Fediverse(Mastodon/Frendica/…) server(except maybe for the already existing PeerTube Server).
Firstly

@Emerodh

Would you be able to help us budget it?

if budget would be a problem, as well as additional manpower for administrating, it might be a good idea to stick to one of the already exiting instances and create an account there.
There are already quite a lot Pirate affiliated servers out there, see this list in the German Wiki.

Secondly just spinning up a - lets say Mastodon - account, would be much quicker in any case, and than you or the PR ppl can probably better see the limitations etc, and even if you later on decide to host your own Mastodon server, account migration between Mastodon instances is very easy, all followers can be transferred to the new account.

Thirdly due to the federated architecture of the Fediverse, creating an account on a public server can give - at least initially - better discover ability than creating one on a private server, since Mastodon users dont really see posts of accounts they dont follow unless they are on the same instance(or a user they follow shares the post).
(Of course issue Nr. 3 is mostly irrelevant once the account has reached a certain size, or a few posts are widely shared across the network. However as I mentioned secondly, migrating an account from one mastodon server to another is very easy, so you could just migrate once you spun up your own instance)

Frendica or other Fediverse platforms

Of course Frendica accounts could also be migrated, however AFAIK the feature is still experimental, so it might not work as well. Also Frendica is more Facebook like, while Mastodon is more Twitter like from an interface and interaction point of view.
Pixelfed would be the Instagram like alternative, while users of all of these services can follow and interact with each other, depending on the users platform interactions can be limited. Which is why I recommend using a platform that fits the desired use case best. I.e. probably Mastodon or Frendica in your case, for a general purpose Social Media account.

PeerTube

While I said that you dont really need to host your own Mastodon/Frendica server just yet, for the reasons listed above.
A PeerTube(basically the Fedivers’ YouTube equivalent) server might still be worth hosting yourself, since 1. you already have one(update it please)^^, 2. storage is still a bit expensive so uploading a lot of videos would probably be a big burden to most public PeerTube instances, 3. If we embed the PeerTube videos somewhere it might be a good idea to have them “internally” so that we wouldnt involve a third party, and 4. again we already have one and there would even be potentially fresh demand to use that server (for instance by the psc, as mentioned in my other thread)

[Nick]

@macfranc

Finally, if I remember correctly, Michael Vogel, one of the developers of Friendica is also a member of the German Pirate Party.

That’s true,

@macfranc

There is also the possibility of federating the PPEU website, activating the free plugin developed by Matthias Pfefferle for Automattic.

2. Create a PPEU Mastodon instance, dedicated only to the institutional account or with the possibility of limiting the registration to MEPs or to all pirate deputies elected in the member states. Eventually, it could also be possible to allow registration to all members of national pirate parties.
3. As point 2) but using Friendica

100%, there certainly are a lot of options,
@Emerodh if you need any more information feel free to reach out, I could also drop by at the international coordination meeting this Tuesday(27. May) if you or whoever wants to have a little chat about the whole Fediverse stuff etc, might be quicker to explain and answer questions in a call, since a lot of details might not be relevant or very relevant to you.

Cheers,
Nick

[macfranc]

Compared to all the advantages of Friendica, Mastodon has only one advantage over Friendica: writing a message from Mastodon is easier.
But Mastodon users do not need to create a Friendica account, because the two software are federated.

Furthermore, the possibility of creating Friendica groups (a sort of Facebook groups) is a formidable value.

An averagely prepared person does not find any difficulty in using Friendica and the visibility of Friendica posts is exactly the same as Mastodon posts.

However, in my opinion, the main reason why one should opt for Friendica is that Mastodon is “centralizing” a “decentralized” universe like the Fediverse.
Joining the Fediverse is not just adopting a tool, it is also “sending a message”! Opting for Friendica means sending an even stronger message.

Here you can find a guide to Friendica in Italian, but understandable with any automatic translator: W la Friendica (che dio la benedèndica): la guida al Facebook del Fediverso – informapirata

Here is a guide to the Raccoon for Friendica app: https://www.informapirata.it/2024/10/18/raccoon-the-friendica-app-that-also-has-surprises-for-mastodon-users-automatic-translation-from-italian/

@Nick

Thirdly due to the federated architecture of the Fediverse, creating an account on a public server can give - at least initially - better discover ability than creating one on a private server,[/quote]

This is generally true, but there are many ways to work around this problem

[quote=“Nick, post:4, topic:920”] since Mastodon users dont really see posts of accounts they dont follow unless they are on the same instance(or a user they follow shares the post).

This is a bit more complex

[quote=“Nick, post:4, topic:920”](Of course issue Nr. 3 is mostly irrelevant once the account has reached a certain size, or a few posts are widely shared across the network. However as I mentioned secondly, migrating an account from one mastodon server to another is very easy, so you could just migrate once you spun up your own instance)
[/quote]

@Nick

Also Frendica is more Facebook like, while Mastodon is more Twitter like from an interface and interaction point of view.

Yes, you are absolutely right!

@Nick

Of course Frendica accounts could also be migrated, however AFAIK the feature is still experimental, so it might not work as well.

Friendica’s migration is not experimental at all, but in my opinion it is much cleaner than Mastodon’s.

Warning: migrating an account from one Mastodon server to another Mastodon server allows you to keep your followers, but all posts produced up to that point will remain on the old server.

[macfranc]

@Nick

@Emerodh if you need any more information feel free to reach out, I could also drop by at the international coordination meeting this Tuesday(27. May) if you or whoever wants to have a little chat about the whole Fediverse stuff etc, might be quicker to explain and answer questions in a call, since a lot of details might not be relevant or very relevant to you.

I agree with your approach. Making someone understand how the Fediverse works is much more difficult than making them use it and a chat in front of a computer is always better than a written guide.

However, to make people understand the potential of the Fediverse it is important to evaluate the compatibility with the current communication strategy and perform an impact analysis of the communication on the Fediverse, otherwise any cost would be too high.

[Emerodh]

Thank you.

When I was asking about the budgeting, it was about what it would cost. I do understand the benefit of using a public / established / big instance for discovery and convenience on the financial and administration front.

Having our instance would allow us to use our domain names, but comes with the cost trade-off, especially if scaling down on the discoverability.

[macfranc]

As I said above, you are overly fearing the detectability problem. It is enough that a few pirates among those who are probably already registered in the top ten largest servers in the world, commit to re-sharing the posts of the PPEU account and the visibility problem is solved in a couple of days.

The Fediverse is still small and pirates are present in the Fediverse to a greater extent than most other political movements.

Keep in mind that my account has 7000 followers and the account of Patrick Breyer (Patrick Breyer (@echo_pbreyer@digitalcourage.social) - digitalcourage.social) has 12000, while the average of followers is well under 100!

[Nick]

100% agree,

@macfranc

This is a bit more complex

to this and all, true,
I just wanted to keep my response somewhat shorter, to explain it all I could write an essay, which is why I suggested the chat.
But if @Emerodh did just need to know the budgeting you are probably much better at answering that question than I am.
I could of course also reach out to our Frendica Admin and ask how many resources they need, for comparison.

@macfranc

An averagely prepared person does not find any difficulty in using Friendica

On last note although I haven’t used Frendica in a while, sometimes Frendica Posts don’t look good on Mastodon(the biggest fish in the Fediverse), so whoever posts to Frendica IMHO really has to get briefed, or maybe in the beginning check if it is displayed correctly on Mastodon etc