The broad approach to social networking presented by Mastodon and other federated networks is "spend your time/resources on funding the network instead of paying someone else much less to do it." It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor.
For instance, the solution to content moderation and harassment is:
> “Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself. Thanks to the network’s spread out and independent nature there are more moderators who you can approach for personal help, and servers with strict codes of conduct.”
The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible.
As a libertarian this is really attractive to me, but in our current system, politically, it's completely infeasible and more than that just a little actively not wanted. People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a pain in the ass.
I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already.
I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers.
> People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them.
I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government". In the case of Mastodon, I can find a smaller instance with a handful of moderators who I trust, and let them curate that instance. If I later find that they have abused that trust I can disassociate with them and move to a different instance, and all of my contacts or the general public on other instances remain unaffected.
If a user doesn't want to go to the effort of finding a specific instance that suits their desires for moderator activity, they can easily set up on one of the biggest instances (much the way one can easily set up a gmail account), while the design of the system still preserves their freedom to move to another instance if they later decide to do so (as I can choose to set up a yahoo or fastmail account, or even run my own server).
The basic experience for the average user can be just as moderated (well or poorly, by as many or as few people) as Twitter is, if a big instance chooses to do so, and the freedom of users is still preserved in a way that Twitter or Facebook cannot.
> I think you're maybe forgetting that the goal of Mastodon, or any federated (as opposed to distributed) system, is not to have every single user run and administer their own instances, but rather to enable users to freely select from a wide variety of compatible interconnected peers.
This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales.
> I think people mostly want a smaller power to do it for them, or at least a "smaller than The Platform, or The Government".
People want the freedom of small networks while gaining the moderation protection of larger ones. People's beliefs about this are largely incoherent imo. That being said I'm broadly against heavy handed moderation, and so I'm happy to see it being solved by fragmenting the community rather than enforcing undesirable norms across it.
> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales.
I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system?
The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.
The main difference is that, if you want something smaller and less overbearing, it's a lot cheaper to move from mastodon.social to some small instance than it is to move from California to Vermont.
> I don't entirely understand why you assume that one node will come to dominate such that it will be equivalent to a centralized system?
One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things.
> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.
The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation, removing the right to leave, effectively centralizing it under federal control) when the country was founded.
(Edit: I reversed the terms confederation and federation here, but what I mean is that the founding of the US removed sovereignty from the states.)
This is where the rubber meets the road: any decentralized system will need to be able to answer the question "how do we [the govt, usually] forcibly remove content from the network?" The way you answer that question will be the way the network centralizes.
The history of true confederations (Colonial States, Personal Computing, the Internet) is that they are temporary chaotic moments before we revert back to the mean of centralization (United States, SaaS/FB/Gmail/centralized communication and iphones as tracking devices, PRISM).
This is all an instance of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law. Our culture is not confederated, and so we wont be able to build scalable confederated systems within it.
> The USA is actually not a federation, and purposefully stopped being one (it turned in a confederation
You have it backwards. The USA was a Confederation (a weak alliance of almost entirely independent nations) under the Articles of Confederation, 1776-1789
Then in 1789 it became a Federation (a strong national union of autonomous but not independent states) with the new Constitution.
In a confederation, the central government has negligible power and states can come and go as they please. The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's pretty much the only modern example, because confederations rarely last long. Historical confederations include the CSA and Holy Roman Empire.
That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold (otherwise it would be called the confediverse). Mastodon is intended to be structured as a Federation, like the United States, Germany, or Malaysia, with a strong but limited central power that maintains unity among the federated members, while mostly letting them do their own thing.
Sorry yeah, I reversed the terms, in response to this:
> The term "federation" is borrowed from political science for a reason. Just like in the USA, multiple federated states who share broad-strokes policies maintain interoperability while also maintaining their own sovreignty.
which is not true, under a federation the members do not maintain sovereignty, and this is the important point. The Colonial States gave up their sovereignty when they became federated.
Everything else, besides the terms reversal (my bad), it seems we agree on?
> The EU is arguably a confederation, and it's pretty much the only modern example, because confederations rarely last long.
Exactly!
> That is not the model that the Fediverse wants to uphold
So what are we even arguing about here? We agree decentralization wont last long. If you're using the US as an example of a desirable "light hand" federation I guess that's just where we agree to disagree.
> One, or a small number, and because this is the history of these types of things.
It's worth teasing this apart.
There is a befuddling belief on the part of some decentralization advocates -- and of some decentralization detractors! -- that decentralization must imply an even distribution of power or influence.
That strikes me as unrealistic in the extreme; meaningful networked ecosystems essentially never converge to uniform distribution. Power laws are the norm, not the exception.
I try to avoid "decentralized"'s linguistic baggage by using the term "federated" instead. Email is federated; Gmail is its behemoth... and that's okay.
(As for Mastodon: today, the majority of the network's traffic resides on the largest 5 of 3500+ publicly announced instances. It's power laws all the way down.)
> There is a befuddling belief on the part of some decentralization advocates -- and of some decentralization detractors! -- that decentralization must imply an even distribution of power or influence.
No, it's that if you observe that power laws are the norm, as you stated, then you start to see decentralization as a process, not a state of being. The idea that a network (or governance structure) "is decentralized by design" makes no sense. If you know decentralization is temporary, it's hard to take Mastodon etc. seriously.
Alas, I don't quite understand the point you're trying to make (and I'd like to!)
Perhaps this will clarify things: I think "decentralized by design" is linguistically ambiguous, because "decentralized" has a bunch of odd baggage -- do you think it's reasonable to say that email is "decentralized by design", and why (or why not)?
Sorry, I'll attempt to clarify: most human networks obey power laws in terms of centralization. For instance, the vast majority of the content is produced by a tiny minority.
Sometimes humans make networks in which this is no longer true, that is content is produced basically equally among all, or at least most, members of the network. These are decentralized networks.
These types of networks are not sustainable or large for a broad host of reasons, and so they form only temporarily. But they are desirable, and valuable, which is why they still form at all.
Email exists well within our very centralized federated political and cultural system, and so no, it is not meaningfully decentralized. We do have some small, decentralized networks (artist communes, maybe qualify?) within the US, but they do not scale. Mastodon will also fall prey to the same issues: as soon as it is big enough for anyone to care about, regulation will come, and regulation will require significant centralization.
> Email exists well within our very centralized federated political and cultural system, and so no, it is not meaningfully decentralized.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this, especially since you go on to say that artist communes in the US qualify. Surely these artist communes exist within our centralized political and cultural system as well? These communes presumably refer crimes such as murder to the centralized authority, the police, rather than lynch mob.
I actually suspect that any significant regulation of Mastodon would in fact increase decentralization. Since the software itself is open source, it will be hard to regulate, if not impossible (is code speech?). That means regulators have to go after hosts of instances. Perhaps some instances will comply with regulation, but I suspect many will not. The largest of the non-complying instances will be shut down.
If the complying instances are seen as inferior to non-complying instances, instead of flocking to the complying instances, the users of the instances that were shut down should distribute themselves amongst the remaining non-compliant instances. Some of these instances will be outside of the centralized authority's jurisdiction (for example, after SESTA, many sex workers flocked to a mastodon instance that was specifically set up for them; this instance is hosted outside the jurisdiction of the US).
> I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this, especially since you go on to say that artist communes in the US qualify. Surely these artist communes exist within our centralized political and cultural system as well? These communes presumably refer crimes such as murder to the centralized authority, the police, rather than lynch mob.
Yes, that's definitely true. There's a no true scotsman element to this, I know. What I meant by that was that the artist communes were meaningfully decentralized in terms of individuals artistic contributions (even then, only some of them are), not entirely, politically etc. I would still argue that they can be more "meaningfully" decentralized than email based on how much easier it is for the government to control email than physical space, but this stuff is difficult to discuss without lossy abstractions as you've pointed out.
> I actually suspect that any significant regulation of Mastodon would in fact increase decentralization. Since the software itself is open source, it will be hard to regulate, if not impossible (is code speech?). That means regulators have to go after hosts of instances. Perhaps some instances will comply with regulation, but I suspect many will not. The largest of the non-complying instances will be shut down.
This is true, but only until physical server location becomes the relevant attribute for jurisdiction. Mastodon instances within the US will be hosted on AWS, Azure etc., and will have no choice but to comply with regulations.
> Some of these instances will be outside of the centralized authority's jurisdiction (for example, after SESTA, many sex workers flocked to a mastodon instance that was specifically set up for them; this instance is hosted outside the jurisdiction of the US).
I keep seeing this pointed out, but I don't think it's a positive. Not only are you still aggregating vulnerable people on a service not designed for secure communications, that can certainly be surveilled by US law enforcement even if it can't be shut down, you're also increasing the incentive for the government to regulate the international internet.
I'm fully in agreement with you on this, given that you take "decentralized" to imply "uniform (or nearly uniform) distribution of power/influence".
As an aside, this exemplifies why I tend to avoid the term "decentralized" in the current context: not everyone makes the assumption of uniformity when they read this word.
That's just out-of-scope of the tool in question (Mastodon). Any tool is helpless against Human control. If that is the case the I think I know what you mean by "not meaningfully decentralized".
BUT, if we can at least break the monopoly of FB and Twitter into at least a hexapoly, then that has still meaning. The internet's design allowed for many to use it meaningfully decentralized for many years.
Also, BitTorrent got lots of gov't regulation, but I can still use it since I'm outside the west. And rutrackerDOTorg is so good. I think that is meaningful.
The long-term solution for this Human problem -I believe is to for employees to own corporations. Gov't is corruptible by private companies that is run by modern feudal lords called Executives. The larger the domain of these companies, the more influence it can do to the Gov't. And we have now reach a point in history that these Modern Feudal Lords has acquired all their competitions (Oracle, Disney, that rich dirty old man who owns all new corporations, Bezos, etc.) and is ready to reincarnate Hitler but with orange skin.
And by employees owning corporations. I mean 1-person-1-vote, instead of 1-share-1-vote. Managers and CEOs can still exist, but is not permanent. Employee-owners can recall them anytime, and they can agree for a quarterly or semi-annual evaluation. Employee-owners also decide how much to pay Managers and CEOs, how to use the profit. You may ask if this company can survive? This has been done in large scale by Mondragon, a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. Not perfect but it has done good progress.
> The long-term solution for this Human problem -I believe is to for employees to own corporations.
We're right back to confederation. No one wants to deal with this shit otherwise they already would, hence federation instead.
> And by employees owning corporations. I mean 1-person-1-vote, instead of 1-share-1-vote. Managers and CEOs can still exist, but is not permanent. Employee-owners can recall them anytime, and they can agree for a quarterly or semi-annual evaluation. Employee-owners also decide how much to pay Managers and CEOs, how to use the profit. You may ask if this company can survive? This has been done in large scale by Mondragon, a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain. Not perfect but it has done good progress.
No one would ever agree to this except employees. Mondragon works because it pays basically what would be paid regardless. The actual executives managing the Mondragon foundation are not constrained to the same pay structures that the people working in the coops are. The number of non-owning employees is also growing fairly rapidly.
> This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales
Would you say the same about email? Gmail may be huge, but I still wouldn't call email a centralized system. I imagine Mastodon would have a similar fate, if it gets big.
>This looks like a networking protocol, but this is actually process for electing the main node in the network, which will eventually revert it back to the mean of centralization. Let's see how Mastodon scales.
You are missing the point. The fact that some instances will get way bigger than others is fine. People will choose whatever instance they prefer and will have that power. This will allow for heavily curated instances as well as more free ones. You choose your poison. You can't do that on other platforms.
Aren't you then condemned to either suffering the lowest common denominator (Since the value of a network is n^2 - if even a margin chunk of the network can't sue something, it's value rapidly decays) or are doomed to a bunch of kinda-federated-but-not-really cloud of almost compatible ponds instead of one large ocean.
With a twitter-like system, is there that much to lose when starting over, other than the community itself? I don't use twitter at all, but I'm imagining a twitter migration similar to a * chan mass migrations; the only baggage to take is the people and their way of doing things. I suppose with twitter you get a history of tweets, but as I understand it, tweets are only accidentally preserved, much in the same way * chans are by archival services. But they're not really meant to be referenced 5 years from now, as a longer-form document might.
> I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities.
Users love putting enormous amounts of effort into building functional, healthy communities online. What was that Reddit spectacle where r/ThanosDidNothingWrong "banned" half the users? That's a perfect example of how sophisticated a userbase can get-- using a feature of a service in a clever and unexpected way but without causing harm to the users or the system.
If it seems like users don't want to do that kind of work on a particular social network, it's probably a symptom that something fundamental isn't working in the software.
Users will do creative things on services that give them the freedom to do it. But they can't and won't fix design issues to make the service usable in the first place.
What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work!
The tricky thing about naysaying technology is that naysayers are almost always correct. This doesn't mean that they have useful information (you could refer to Bayes theorem for instance, and look at P(Failure|Prediction), the probability of failure given that an inexpert observer has predicted failure). It's just very easy for casual observers to pick at things.
Additionally:
-What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit?
-You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor?
> What purpose does HN serve when we already have reddit? Replicated work!
I think you're missing the point. All of these are examples of successful centralized networks. The idea that mastodon will not fall prey to the same incentives facebook did is based on it being meaningfully decentralized. It is extremely unlikely to me that as the network scales (it has 100kish DAUs right now) meaningful decentralization will continue to exist.
> -What would you say about a site like reddit that "replicates moderation" at each subreddit?
It doesn't, in a meaningful way, because if the government wants to shut something down on reddit they contact reddit, not the moderator of a subreddit.
> -You also seem to be saying that creating a small business is a dead-end endeavor, that competition between similar businesses is old-fashioned. What if an entrepreneur wants to create a twitter competitor?
I would agree with that in most cases, depending on your goals, and would wish the twitter competitor the best of luck.
When you use a corporate social network, you are trusting a bunch of people trying to make enough money to pay Silicon Valley rent (never mind pay back huge piles of VC investment) to do the moderation. They are likely to be more interested in a constantly-rising user count and ever-longer user sessions that give them opportunities to sneak in as many ads around the edges as possible; they are probably only going to kick people off for behavior that can get the company sued.
When you use Mastodon, you are trusting a handful of people who are probably running it as a hobby to do the moderation. Their only goal may be to have a nice, chill place to chat with friends; they can kick people off for whatever kind of behavior they find undesirable, whether that be "repeatedly failing to post pictures of cats on Mandatory Cat Post Day", "talking about feet on No-Feets Friday", or "using the Banned Circular Letter six times" on an instance that demands you never use the letter O.*
And if an admin finds that they are getting a lot of reports of a foreign instance for behavior they forbid, they can defederate from that instance, thus slicing out a large source of undesired behavior in one go. Users can vote on moderation policies with their feet (though perhaps not on No-Feets Friday if that's the issue that's polarizing huge portions of the overall community) and move to another instance - or maintain two accounts if they want to keep a foothold on both sides of the divide.
I could probably spin this into a metaphor for representative democracy if I wanted. Pick an instance whose admin (and her moderation team, if it's big enough to have one) feels likely to agree with you on moderation, report violations, let her do the dirty work and maybe say "thanks" and give her a little something now and then.
----
* Of course, you could also kick people off your instance for things like "expressing political views opposed to the instance admin" or "acting like this is 4chan". But comedy examples are more fun, and less likely to make you snap into reflexive defense of whatever your position is.
You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example.
> People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved.
This is commonly asserted, but I’ve never seen much evidence for it. Was a direct democracy given a good run in the US at some-point? Do I need communications with my friends to be moderated? Does this effect only kick-in when finding strangers, attempting to influence millions at once, or selling ads? Moderation decisions on Facebook and Twitter make headlines at the moment, it doesn’t seem to me that people don’t care, or don’t want to be heard.
I agree with you that Mastodon is unlikely to ‘take-over’ Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But that wouldn’t be my criteria for success.
> You still pay someone else to run the server (or not, if you prefer), you can just choose who you pay, and which server. Sending toots does not require that you set up your own infra, re: the email example.
Right, you either pay with your time or your money, as opposed to FB for which you pay nothing at all. Specialization of labor reduces costs, federation increases them.
> This is commonly asserted, but I’ve never seen much evidence for it. Was a direct democracy given a good run in the US at some-point?
It's never been technically feasible, though the main issue has changed from scale to security.
> I agree with you that Mastodon is unlikely to ‘take-over’ Twitter or Facebook anytime soon. But that wouldn’t be my criteria for success.
I can understand why that wouldn't be your criteria for success, but it is mine.
I'm stunned that people still today don't realize that there is no, big and centralized free services. How would that work on the company side? Who pays for giant servers and software development and maintenance? People are not too sharp in 2018.
I resent the "not too sharp" comment, and the implication that I hadn't even considered the idea that you're paying with your data coming from all three of you.
I'll respond here to all of you that responded generally with "you pay with your data, it's not free."
Ok fine, but you don't know what you're paying with on Mastodon, because you have no idea what any one node might do with your data, because there is no centralized privacy policy. Not a problem, I'm sure you read the privacy policy of every website you join right?
I'm also not sure why you assume a free, ad-based Mastodon service wouldn't exist as the network scaled.
The network has like 100k active users. It's very much in 'virtue untested' territory.
That's fair it was a smart ass-ed comment, didn't mean to offend, but that one was tee'd up there, couldn't resist :)
I haven't tried Mastadon yet, but the fact I can run my own server for my family or close friends at a very low cost seems very appealing. To me this seems like the most likely use case, I can't imagine just going around joining random nodes, so I'm not too woried about the "virtue" of the whole network.
I'm happy to know that there is a solid, open source option like this out there.
If your criteria for success is a large centralized for-profit monopoly, then of course Mastodon will never be successful, since that is the definition of failure in the context of the federated network. And since we have that now, you of course should be perfectly happy with the status quo.
>> It wont "work" for the same reason everyone doesn't host their own email service. It flies in the face of a broader cultural movement we have: specialization of labor.
Define work. By many valid metrics, it's already a resounding success.
Ok, now what if I were to tell you that email itself is a federated system, exactly the same as Mastodon.
All of your questions can be answered with "what does our currrent email system do?".
Sure, most people don't run their own email system. But some do. And you are not forced into a singular option that everyone is required to use.
Despite what people might claim, Hotmail, or numerous other email options are all almost as good as Gmail. Having competing options is good enough, as if you get banned from one, you can move to another (with some friction, obviously).
On expense, well same answer, what does email do? Yes, it is probably more expensive for all these different email servers to exist, but clearly that's OK, as they exist right now.
Now, seeing as tweets and social media posts don't seem like that much more of a difficult problem than email, imagine if those things were federated as well? This doesn't seem to hard to imagine happening.
Right email is the exact model I'm basing my thinking on. You don't see people running their own email servers, you see 4-5 companies in the world gobbling up the VAST majority of the network, even with weak network effects.
I've been thinking about this recently myself and also used email as my go-to example -- and it's not lost on me that, if Mastodon really follows that path, we're likely to end up with a few immense instances that provide added services, either in exchange for a small fee or for ads (or, let's be honest, through data mining).
I suspect one of the biggest potential places for improvement will be providing a semi-formal process around moderation. The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one.
Of course, it's possible that Mastodon -- or, more likely, a future similar network, maybe one built on ActivityPub, too, so it could federate with Mastodon servers transparently -- will solve this by requiring instances to agree to slightly more formal policies around federation and moderation: here is disallowed content, this is the reporting process, this is the appeals process, etc. This can absolutely be done; it was done, three decades or so ago, back in the days of FidoNet. But I suspect the folks most enthusiastic about Mastodon as it exists now would find that anathema.
> The current approach presents itself as a kind of socialist/libertarian communal utopia, and it can be depending on how a given instance is run -- but in practice, each instance is a monarchy with absolute power over not only your presence in the kingdom but which other kingdoms you're allowed to talk to. Your social graph can be broken at any point because your admin has decided, for any reason, to stop federating with an instance you have followers on, or vice-versa. The net effect is that you can be punished for transgressions, real or imagined, that you weren't a party to (and might not even be aware of). And I don't think that has a technical solution, just a policy one.
This is so spot on! It's easy to say Mastodon is solving all these problems, but the reality is that it's just not big enough that it has faced any real challenges, and the challenges it really faces are mostly philosophical, not technical. AFAICT it hasn't scratched the surface on the philosophical governance issues.
The effort required to keep a federated service running is a fraction of its total user base. EG; You don't see most people running their own IRC servers. A small percentage puts in the time for everyone else.
I’m not sure how you could conclude that given that FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible.
Meanwhile, people continue to seek out communities that do represent the types of interactions people want. I’d say it’s succeeding as much as facebook is.
Maybe I'm defining succeeding too narrowly, and sorry to be rude, but what universe do you live in where this is even close to true? Some quick googling shows the network hadn't even cracked 100k users in Feb: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/99469840739197657
> FB is essentially a growth engine designed to drive MAU numbers as high as possible
Right, and it does that by providing a better (a matter of taste, perhaps), cheaper product than Mastodon via specialization of labor, and through network effects, both of which depend on centralization.
FB and similar drive numbers by using shady tactics is what I call it. They have influenced instagram to do similar things as well right? Not giving users what they want, instead spreading it out and making them scroll extra before getting the posts from from friends or other likes. Abusing notifications to get additional usage and other tactics.
I do not consider lack of competing with fbooks numbers as not successful. Unless you are strictly speaking about wall street monetization desires, success of mastodon or other systems to me is whether or not they provide a service that is valuable to those who use it.
Firechat, signal and others may never match the numbers posted by fbook, yet those people who have been able to communicate and share in places without worrying about their messages being stopped by different groups of censors, or worse - these tools are immensely successful, even if they have only helped hundreds or thousands of people and not billions served.
Just because many people are addicted to fbook with thier centralized how to keep them hooked / addiction specialists does not mean it is providing a better product.
Specialization of labor and network effects can be backed into other open source things. The growth of one click installs at places like Digital Ocean is the beginning of this trend imho.
If fbook was the perfect vessel for sharing then phub, whatevertorrent, vpns, and similar would not exist much less be popular.
Has anyone started a MAU chart showing how many users communiques have been shared with govts around the world? Anyone have a tally on the number of arrests in the phillipines (and others) and kills in malaysia (and others) that have been enabled by fbook?
I've people promote fbook as free and state as "fact" that users won't pay for self hosted or moderated solutions.
Fbook is not free, it has many costs.
As some of these alternatives mature, I believe we will see more and more people using them more often. Some paying with cash, some paying with drive space / cycles donated, some paying by giving thanks to friends of family who are allowing them to use slices of their systems.
Mastodon is not better for Kim K, and likely will never be, what is better or not is relative to many factors and that is going to be different for different people / groups.
I was referring to phpBB, actually, but it doesn't matter in this case.
But I'm measuring success by people going out of their way to visit the site--something facebook does not provide. Half the sites on the internet link to it.
> Right, and it does that by providing a better (a matter of taste, perhaps), cheaper product than Mastodon via specialization of labor, and through network effects, both of which depend on centralization.
I can't elect my moderation style on facebook.... so it's not at all equivalent. Centralization is central to why facebook isn't going to be a general purpose forum of use to anyone.
Facebook is like daytime TV with 100 channels and nothing interesting to watch. That may be succeeding in financial terms but there is a lot of room for other services where the aim is not to earn as much money as possible and I stead cater to intelligent people instead of the masses.
This implication you're making about "intelligent people" not using Facebook does nothing to further your argument, and just makes you look like a dick.
If you just want to refer to smaller, more specialized or niche communities instead of mass appeal, then just say that.
I think you are entirely correct and your view does not need to be changed. If you look at how everything is playing out on a geopolitical scale, authoritarian states are winning over democracy. At a macro scale, even in the politics of Tech you can see this. Tech platforms are put under immense pressure from their users to moderate the platform. No one wants to spend the time to filter someone from their view, block people, any of that. They want the platform to do it for them. Platforms KNOW THIS.
>I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already.
If the only people in my online community are people who are willing to put effort into online communities, that's fine by me. Part of why FB/twitter are so draining/unenjoyable is because literally everyone is there.
>The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible.
Have you thought about the possibility that this is exactly what at least some people actually want? Reddit is a great example of a platform that has moderators basically working in a federated way and has been a huge commercial success. By having that commercial success users are now subject to negative market forces that erode the character of the platform because at the end it's not actually federated but the owners simply didn't mess much with it for a while. Mastodon has taken a huge step towards making sure that these market forces can't invade and dominate the platform because Mastodon devs don't actually have the same control that the owners of Reddit do. In other words I don't see why we need to judge Mastodon's success based on it's size but based on it's viability as a platform which is already pretty decent. And each Mastodon instance is free to solve it's own funding issues so I don't see how the fact that there is no central advertising and the "cost" of moderation is higher affects it. So the usual success rating of how many users you have does not apply directly on Mastodon.
>I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already.
There is a fairly large number of people who put considerable hours moderating fb groups for no profit. The same goes for reddit moderators. Every one of them could potentially launch or help moderate a Mastodon instance( especially a topic-specific one). So the number of people caring required is much smaller than you might think. Besides if your point is that people don't want this control, let's remove blocks/mutes and see the chaos unfold.
The net effect is that you'll more likely come into contact with the kind of preferential modding that suits your own tastes.
Birds of a feather. One community might mod your type with an iron fist, but jump to another server, where a diametrically opposed set of opinions prevail, and you'll feel more at home.
> People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a pain in the ass.
People don't want to be involved? Do you have any evidence for this?
If this is true then all the stuff about Agile and autonomy I hear a lot isn't true then? Richard Hendricks should've just stayed as subordinate to Gavin Belson. Why start a startup?
Colonies should've stayed colonies and kiss the Queen's feet. Being able to decide for our own selves is a pain the ass huh?
You may genuinely don't care what Trump decides for you. But I'm pretty sure many who can barely survive cares.
The general public will use the popular centralized services that is using their data to get rich.
There is still room for technical alternatives for users who want something different, even if that is only 0.1%.
Even with Slack being very popular, irc is not going away, because it still is better than Slack in areas that are valuable to people. No lock-in, open source protocols, and also the fact that it's still good after all these years.
You say that it's infeasible but haven't given any reason other than "people don't want this" which is objectively untrue. Lots of people want this, and if you've been on Twitter lately you've probably heard that people are leaving the "bird site"[1] for one of the instances hosted by their community.
So I guess I'd need to ask you for your specific and unconventional definition of what "works." It works for plenty of people already.
I've been quite satisfied with my "instance-of-one" via Masto.host.
Mine is a much shorter domain than the average instance that I've had in my back pocket for years, which I find is also nice for a number of interesting small reasons (including sharing links to Mastodon statuses on places like Slack).
I'm not sure I intend to always keep it to just myself, and I've made offers to give accounts to friends, but so far no one has taken me up on the offer. I definitely don't ever expect to allow public signups, though.
It's open source. You can change this to say whatever you want if you're willing to run it yourself, or you can find a place that's changed it to something you think sounds better than "toot".
> Could it be that extinct mastodons grunted or growled instead of tooting?
We can presume Mastodons shared many characteristics with modern day Elephants, which from zoo anecdotes seem capable of grunting, growling, and (both types of) tooting, to communicate different things.
Today I tried another software for the fediverse: pleroma.
So far the fediverse isn't for me. I don't want to join an existent instance. I don't want to run a large project like Mastodon.
And pleroma looked about right for me. But it's currently only for insiders. (I'm using Linux since the 1990s and have installed different news and mail servers. Maybe my patience isn't what it used to be but I don't have any plans on trying pleroma again soon.)
All the other projects are either in a very early stage or use technology I trust less than C News.
> I don't want to run a large project like Mastodon.
There are good options like Masto.host that will run Mastodon for you, but you can bring your own domain. I find that a satisfying middle ground, and it's what I use for my own instance.
Is there a way to make a mastodon instance for a private community where it requires registration (& approval) like a forum, but still have the federation between instances? (if not, is it possible to unfederate an instance?)
Yes. It's very easy to lock down registrations, say to your family or coworkers, and still federate. You can also turn off federation if you want an internal-only instance.
As I understand it, you can require users to get approval in order to register locally, and there are at least patches out there to create a whitelist of instances that are allowed to federate with you, but there's no way to require users from the allowed instances to get approval before interacting with local posts.
Private Accounts (also sometimes referred to as Locked Down Accounts) require explicit follow approvals and many federated actions are restricted only to direct followers. It's an easy task if you are an instance admin creating all accounts to default new accounts to Private instead Public (which is the usual default elsewhere). Accounts can switch themselves between Private and Public as needs change (though there are obvious caveats when switching).
Yes, but it's sometimes good to look at the local instance timeline and find most toots (tweets in Mastodon for the uninitiated) related to your interests.
Mastodons were quite different from mammoths, and not closely related. Mammoths were relatively close to Asian elephants, diverging something like 7 million years ago (like us and chimpanzees), but mastodons diverged from elephants and mammoths more like 25 million years ago (like old world monkeys and apes/humans).
It's also used in more musical contexts, as with horns and trumpets -- for instance, "to toot one's own horn". (Animals with large trunks, like elphants and mastodons, would be considered to trumpet.) The fact that a fart makes a sound like that of a trumpet merely makes it a convenient bowdlerization.
For instance, the solution to content moderation and harassment is:
> “Mastodon comes with effective anti-abuse tools to help protect yourself. Thanks to the network’s spread out and independent nature there are more moderators who you can approach for personal help, and servers with strict codes of conduct.”
The solution can't just be "there are more people moderating," which translates to: the network is much more expensive to run. But that abstraction is the solution to everything in a federated system: spread out power so it isn't corruptible.
As a libertarian this is really attractive to me, but in our current system, politically, it's completely infeasible and more than that just a little actively not wanted. People don't want to moderate themselves, they want a larger power to do it for them. It's why we have representative democracy instead of direct democracy: people don't want to be involved. Governing is a pain in the ass.
I can respect that Mastodon is philosophically consistent: if you want to really control your communications, you need to put in the effort. I hope to be wrong about this, but people simply to not want to put this much effort into online communities. If they did we wouldn't have FB, IG and Twitter already.
Please: CMV.