1/7 First time dabbling with #decentralized social media - what better time to make some predictions about it? Clearly is a backlash against censorship/moderation policies from centralized services like twitter.
Network effects are strong, though, so there will need to be a *strong* reason for more people to leave #Twitter for #Mastodon. The current levels of moderation are, IMO, enough to get more fringe and privacy-oriented folks (like the fine people of #Bitcoin twitter) to move over.
2/7 But things will have to get substantially worse before we can reach a tipping point that can overcome Twitters *massive* head start wrt network effect.
The peeps running Twitter must know this, so I'd say there's a high (>90%) chance that they reign themselves in before this happens, and the majority of people remaining grudgingly satisfied enough with the situation to not leave.
Let's say that something causes a push to that tipping point. Maybe Twitter overplays their hand.
3/7 Maybe they are forced to by a government. Maybe another factor indirectly causes a shift. Let's assume for a minute that it happens, and people start moving en masse and Mastodon takes over. Huzzah! Now what? We now have our censorship-free utopia!
Well, not quite.
I expect the first thing people would learn is that every does like a bit of censorship/moderation. They just call it censorship if it's more than they'd like, and moderation if it's the 'right' amount (or less).
4/7 The person who truly doesn't believe in any censorship on platforms is the one who goes to 4chan and thinks 'ok, this is aight...but what's with the ban on CP?'
Fortunately, there aren't many of those people. So what's going to happen is people will simply gravitate toward servers that have their preferred level of moderation, and they can claim others are too strict, and others are too lax.
Now, this is still a big step forward, right? Well, no and yes.
5/7 I'll start with no. "No", because it seems likely to me that people who can run more successful instances, could probably figure out a way to monetize it. And if they can, that means they can probably pay devs to make custom upgrades to their instances which they may not be incentivized to open-source, since it gives them a leg up.
So we'll likely just have a new censor running things in place of our twitters and facebooks, and not quite that utopia people wish for.
6/7 Now for the yes. "Yes", because to a certain degree, the network effect can be shared between different platforms competing to provide more desirable rules.
Remember that tipping point that must be reached before people leave Twitter? That's going to be a whole hell of a lot lower for switching between instances of Mastodon, than it is for leaving Twitter outright.
This leaves me with two questions:
7/7 1. What did I get wrong? No way I was right about all that. Let me know!
2. If we agree that Twitter is unlikely to overplay its hand enough to send a tipping-point number of people here, how can we lower that tipping point?
(Without resorting to evil things like fostering abuse of moderation privilege on Twitter, or stuff like that, of course.)
@mariogibney Regarding point 5: Mastodon is licensed under the AGPL v3 license, so all modifications must be published under the AGPL and have their source code made publically available and include a link to that source code with every distribution. Also, running it on a server counts as distribution.
So it's literally illegal to make alterations to Mastodon without publishing them :)
@mariogibney One other thing with respect to the network effect: even if Mastodon itself doesn't catch on, it doesn't matter. The ActivityPub specification is a W3C standard, so any new ActivityPub implementation gets to start with 2 million potential users instead of 0. Some cool things to check out as well:
- PeerTube (YouTube)
- Plume (Medium)
- Funkwhale (SoundCloud / Grooveshark)
You can follow users of those apps through Mastodon! Here's a PeerTube demo: https://peertube.mastodon.host/videos/watch/da2b08d4-a242-4170-b32a-4ec8cbdca701
@harding Cool, thanks for the response - that paints a slightly rosier picture. 😀
Any thoughts on the odds of reaching a successful tipping point to overcome the centralized services' network effect advantage?
@mariogibney THE BEST THING ABOUT DECENTRALIZATION IS THAT I CAN FUCKING TELL OU THAT YOUR ARTICLE AND REVIEW IS SHIT, withotu CENSORSHIP
SO HERE WE GO
FUCK YOU and YOUR ARTICLE.
Mario⚡️Gibney
infinite love ⴳ
David A. Harding
i am not carpe noctom 98k july