Bart Meeus 🌞Nov 5, 2022

What if? What if the truly social medium Mastodon was upscaled fast enough to really accommodate a huge birdsite exit?

#whatif we petitioned the #EU to setup a fund (couple billions, they do it all the time) to be used for Mastodon server stup, cost and rollout?
No strings attached, except that servers use this server's rules. Aligns with their values.
Can be used to boost existing and start up new servers.

Stupid? Too big? Wrong?

Show threadDave WarnockNov 5, 2022
@bartmeeus maybe but it would be risky in terms of control of the fediverse shifting to big business.
I'd go for horizontal growth.
I'd like to see people with the right skills setup many more small businesses each running masto.hosts with each of them able to run hundreds of new instances.
That would allow multiple times more instance servers. That would increase the total potential number of accounts by several orders of magnitude with much less risk of a take over attempt.
Show threadDave WarnockNov 5, 2022
@bartmeeus the popular instances can then grow past their masto.hosts to standalone at around 100,000 accounts like mstdn.social by this point capacity is greater than the birdSite has been without the hosting & moderation complexity of really big instances
Show threadBart Meeus 🌞
@Dave42W I'm actually curious about the moderation. I've seen one ban being reported. And a WHOLE LOT of nice people (even though #twittermigration must be taxing).
And yes, I wrote "no strings attached". No EU ownership or something. I imagine there would always be some rules as to how funds are to be used and who can apply. I've experienced first hand how some large funding is there for the taking "if you know the way". Not good.
Nov 5, 2022 at 1:38pmWeb
Show threadDave WarnockNov 6, 2022

@bartmeeus re moderation most instances will have lists of blocked hosts. I'm looking at using https://hachyderm.io/@nova/109292353164546859 at https://aMastodon.uk

As for EU funding my experience is that it massively favours large corporate interests so I'm somewhat cynical.