We tried to run a social media site and it was awful
News, analysis and comment from the Financial Times, the worldʼs leading global business publication
Extinction looms for FTAV’s Mastodon presence
It's telling that most of their problems were regulatory/legal rather than technical. (they only have one bullet point about "a bunch of techy stuff".)
But the whole article has a very strong "how do you do, fellow kids?" vibe. I think the fediverse will manage to survive without the Financial Times' mastodon server.
There's also the point about upgrades and storage growing exponentially, which is one of the most recurring complaints about running a fediverse server. Even the ones that are can lighter than mastodon have to contend with huge databases that never stop growing.
but as failed experiments go, this one hasn’t cost anyone $44bn
Zing
Hi-oooooooo
Really shows you need to do your research and take your time when setting up a community
So, this sounds entirely different than what the BBC did, which is close their server to just their journalism accounts. I don't see any issue with that. FT just did it wrong. https://social.bbc/public/local
Respect to them for trying something new, can't blame them for it not working out. Though from the article it doesn't sound like they had any major issue with mastodon or its administration itself - their primary issue was the legal risks, which really should have been considered before launching. It seems disingenuous to use a headline like that when the main problem wasn't the running of the site, but a fear of legal repurcussions that could have been easily seen before making the site. That's my two cents anyway.
It is sad how regulation of social media seems to affect smaller sites more than the big ones. Legal liability looks very different to a company with flocks of lawyers than someone hosting a small server at home.
Mastodon administrators have access to everyone's private messages? Wtf? Is lemmy like that?
Anyone who owns a server can access all the data stored on it, unless the data is end-to-end encrypted. Whether it's mastodon, Lemmy, Facebook, twitter, Gmail, vBulletin, whatever.
If you need to say something that you can't risk anyone else seeing, use an end-to-end encrypted messaging app, or implement encryption yourself using e.g. PGP.
