Whoa whoa whoa...
Whoa.
You mean to tell me that #Mastodon has *zero* algorithms deciding what I should read, and that the vast majority of instances banish Nazis into their own shadowrealm instead of tolerating them in the name of EnGaGeMenT?
Hah! Next you'll tell me there are no advertisers wielding influence over feature design so they get more marketing eyeballs!
Wait, what??!
@williamgunn @zaskoda It's the early days for some, but others have been here for years. The system is built around a collection of ideally small nodes that are all relatively cheap to run. People flock to some of the larger, established instances, which usually start taking monthly contributions to cover admin costs.
Management companies are already here to reduce friction for non-technical users. It works. It's the original internet in action again.
@zaskoda @williamgunn @chartier
The problem with email is that it's hard to change the service after-the-fact if you didn't think to separate the service from the address from the begin. This isn't the case here.
@zaskoda @gerwitz Gotta disagree on the 'running your own server' point.
Running your own *physical* server, in your own garage? Sure, maybe. But I think it's easy to say most people wouldn't want to do that anyway. They'd go to a service provider like any of the zillions of web hosts and even dedicated email services we have, and those are all dirt cheap. No ads, pro-privacy, etc.
(Contd)
@zaskoda @gerwitz Do most people want fedi/masto to be free? I think that's a tough call. The network is designed to prefer lots of small instances (over 1,100 now), which are relatively cheap to run.
Many of them start up Patreons to cover the costs. If they get large enough, it grows to cover mods. It seems to be working quite well so far. I don't see any imminent threat of advertising or other insidious funding mechanisms.
@zaskoda @gerwitz So then the rest of the network can choose to defederate those large, abusive instances. They already do it with Gab and even Mastodon.social and .online for various reasons (many related to poor moderation or deliberate federation with abusive instances).
It's been working well so far. Communities organizing themselves and deciding who they want to hang out with. Just like people IRL. I think it's great.
@zaskoda @chartier I frankly expect an email-like future if Mastodon grows to threaten the ad companies, where e.g. Meta wakes up and makes an easy to understand instance.
The race is on to establish a resilient enough network that this future looks like Gmail’s, where a *lot* of people are happy (or ignorantly) captive but to remain viable is nonetheless compelled to participate in open protocols.
Or to stop before it becomes a threat to the attention monetizers.
@zaskoda @gerwitz Dude at this point it feels like you're just ignoring everything they've been doing different, the potential that *is* here, and the years of growth and experience down these paths that have already happened in Fedi.
If you're stuck on doom and gloom, well that's certainly a take. But I'm here because I believe in it and I'm trying to help in a few places where I can. This is the part of the conversation where I hop off.
@zaskoda @gerwitz Maybe we're talking different levels of running your own server, of which there are many?
I run a couple addresses through my web host. But there are also many dedicated services like Fastmail, where it's basically 'managed' for you and they fight spam quite well.
Like, there's a broad spectrum when it comes to DIY email, and the ecosystem for Masto and Fedi is growing the same way. Has for years.
@zaskoda @gerwitz And, again, while the option is there, I don't think it's controversial to claim that the majority of people won't want to go that route. They'll want something managed, like Fastmail, and plenty of options are springing up.
Digital Ocean. Masto.host, Fedi.Monster, NextCloud, etc. I've heard some traditional web hosts are spinning up one-click options like WordPress and many other apps.
@chartier @zaskoda @gerwitz In a case where you might ever have to deal with, say, the internals of Postgres, the vast, vast majority of people do not want to touch it. Ever. If that's the cost of using this social network, nearly everybody just won't.
The admins I see here do, in fact, have to touch Postgres. It's one reason there aren't more of them, even as the giant Twitter influx happens.
@chartier @zaskoda @gerwitz I'm not saying "Postgres is bad." It's by far the best DB we have. But touching *any* database is too much admin work, and leaves us vulnerable to centralised solutions (unless we have some other way around that.)
Same problem as running an email server, which requires a similar level of ongoing drudgery plus specialised expertise. It's hard to get lots of people doing that for you, at scale.
"We'll just require a lot more good-quality free DevOps" is hard to scale.
@chartier We're now in the end game, full circle XD
No algorithms, no ads, no crap, just, good.
@chartier This is the ✨ FUTURE! ✨
But it is also the past, in a way. 🙂
Really crazy how much Mastodon & Fediverse remind me of the early days of the internet, or even the time when we still connected to mailboxes via modem. 💜
Yes. It would also seem that this place is missing a lot of 'influencers' holding empty game boxes.
@chartier I mean... Gargron does seem to be trying to make the software more and more like Twitter and otherwise obnoxious.
But overall, yeah!
@chartier 4.0 has some annoying shit. The entire mobile UI got completely changed around purely for the sake of change, and it's super annoying now; he's adding /algorithms to search/ (boosts your ranking if you have more followers, what the fuck); logged-out click-on-a-post view needs Javascript now; and I'm sure there's something else I'm forgetting.
Post editing is nice though, at least.
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