Jeremy Paul CarrollNov 19, 2022
Andrew (Television Executive)

Here's your irregular reminder that:

Twitter was a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees.

Mastodon is a niche hobbyist product run by volunteers

The fact that we're being seen as a viable alternative to them is an admission that a federated, decentralized future is not only possible, but desirable.

Mastodon is not one thing, or one place. It's a network of many things and many places. We don't have a spokesperson (I mean, there's me. I'm the official spokesperson for 💯 of the fediverse, but beyond me there is no spokesperson) we don't have consensus on moderation or blocking or tools or what is good and what is bad. Some of us are professional SREs and Sysadmins, some of us aren't. Some of our instances have been around for 5+ years, some won't be here in six months.

And that's good! All of it, every last bit of it is good.

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time, and reclaiming it for the People.

Nov 18, 2022 at 3:31pmWeb
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time.

This is bigger than some technical standard.

This is cultural, political, and economic.

We represent an existential threat to the business model of some of the most wealthy corporations on the planet, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone take that away from us without fighting against it with everything I have.

We are standing on the precipice of a transformative shift in the way we, as a society, relate to one another through the internet.

We are moving away from a Broadcast and Toward a conversation.

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 18, 2022

This is mutual aid, this is anticapitalism, this is collaborative ideation.

We are living revolutionary values, right here, right now, on a silly little social media network.

And I will fight to my last breathe any God Damn corporation that tries to Monetize that.

This is the future, and you're a part of it now. Be a good steward of the future.

Show threadAral BalkanNov 18, 2022
@ajroach42 Which is why we also have to be vigilant about corporations capturing the narrative via corporate proxies like the W3C (who are already publicly patting themselves on the back for having gifted us the fediverse).
Show threadMike 🍁Nov 19, 2022
@aral @ajroach42 I had to lookup W3C first. But they are doing this??
Show threadAral BalkanNov 19, 2022

@ravensview @ajroach42 Look at their membership and the business models of their members. How many of them are surveillance capitalists? (I’ll start the list: Google, Meta, Adobe…)

To see what I mean about surveillance capitalists, see which of those companies are also on https://better.fyi/trackers and also see https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4oOCLIrB-0c

Better

Better is a privacy tool for Safari that protects you from trackers and privacy-eroding ads on the web.

Show threadSimon LucyDec 6, 2023

@aral @ravensview @ajroach42

Rather than just dismiss it.
W3C is a standards organisation with a membership of organisations, many organisations.

For those interested in knowing more about it:
https://www.w3.org/membership/

Why join W3C

Discover the value of joining the Web Consortium.

W3C
Show threadLisaNov 18, 2022
@ajroach42 Thanks so much for enabling this! 👏🏽
Show threadMike 🍁Nov 19, 2022
@ajroach42 Well, Trump already did by stealing the S/W for his Truth Social.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022
@ravensview And the folks running it are losing money hand over fist and have been blocked from the majority of the network.
Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
I don't know that being against billionaires and corporations is
necessarily anticapitalism (private control of capital is what gives us the freedom to create our own websites), but besides that point I agree with everything you've written.

These megacorps have gotten too big for their britches, and they've forgotten we don't actually need them.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@sj_zero I'm pretty sure that being against the capitalist class is the definition of anticapitalism.

Maybe your definition of capitalism differs from the common one, and somehow has grown to include all forms of ownership and commerce?

Websites wouldn't stop existing under socialism, and it's foolish or wildly misleading to pretend otherwise.

Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
Capitalism is usually defined as the private ownership and control of capital, as opposed to cooperative or state ownership and control of capital.

In my view, you don't need corporations to have capitalism. One of my more radical views is that we should get rid of corporations entirely, and then the owner of a thing would be personally responsible when their thing breaks things or people or the environment instead of letting a legal picture of Dorian Grey take the heat.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022
@sj_zero banning corporations from existing sounds an awful lot like an anti-capitalist stance to me, although going hyperindividualist route instead of a collectivist route at the end sounds counterproductive, but if it gets us to a world where the workers own the means of production, I don't much care.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
The liability protection is a net good, IMHO. Especially in the US where we have a judicial system that encourages litigiousness. I mean your local store owner needs it just as much as a giant pharmaceutical company. Yes, not corporations is still capitalistic, but without that construct, you wouldn't have a lot of industries. The risk just wouldn't be worth the reward.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@midway @sj_zero If you can't sell pieces of a company, what's left to call capital? Productive property, machinery and the like, (which no individual could likely afford), land, and ... what?

What's there left to exploit without corporations?

Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
It's all still capital, it's just that it belongs to a person instead of a legal homonculus. Capital equipment doesn't need to be a mile long factory, it can be simple hand tools, or automated CNC or 3d printing machines, or servers. From there, it could become more as a person accomplishes more. Even people can be considered capital. A skilled person can take things that are worthless and make them valuable.

Corporations are a government construct. They don't exist in nature and didn't exist in economies until relatively recently. Their unnatural existence twists the real world.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@sj_zero @midway Right, and it was the creation of the concept of a corporation that gives way to capitalism in the modern sense.

But I can see this conversation isn't going to be productive, so maybe we should move on.

Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
That's fine. I think the disagreement here is more about capitalism itself. And that's ok too.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
We've had recognized corporations since the Romans. Not sure that's recent.
Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
You're right, I thought the history of such things previously seemed to start much later around the 1600s, but the romans recognised it in the 6th century BC. Maybe it looked that way to me because that's when they started to be publicly traded on exchanges?
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
They definitely took off with the Dutch and global trade, no doubt. But the idea is pretty old.

Most corporations are not publicly traded. Hell, my wife has one for her little vintage store. Basically it's there in case someone decides to sue her for whatever reason, they can't take our house, retirement, etc.
Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
The problem with limiting liability is that it means you can get overwhelmingly massive and there's no personal risk to you. If a person has to worry about whether someone is doing something in their name then they've got a good reason to be more careful and limit their growth to what they can personally control since they could lose everything.

I think that the litigiousness is a direct consequence of this: The culture is these megacorporations that can't drain shareholders of anything but the money they've invested, and they don't manage risk because of that, so the lawsuits fly easily and often because the companies are huge enough to have tons of money to pay out and reckless enough that they're making stupid enough mistakes to have to pay out!

Then like bad parts of other cultures, it bleeds into everyday life, and suddenly you've got million dollar lawsuits for nothing between individual people, and then people need millions of dollars of liability insurance just in case, which drives more money and power into the hands of megacorporations.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
@sj_zero Try to not let perfection to be the enemy of the good. Yes there can be bad players in any system. But that liability protection allows ventures to create really good things. It also makes it much easier to spread financial risk (not just lawsuits but business risk in general) by making it easy to bring the partners. Risk has downsides, but it has tremendous upside. The ability for people to take risk is what,ultimately, causes economic growth and benefits to lots of people beyond the corporations themselves.
Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
I know what you're saying, but it seems to me that by creating structures that allow things to grow to be so extraordinarily large and to let individual people become so extraordinarily powerful you end up with a sort of reality warping where the working man's wages are garnished and those tax dollars are often placed directly into the pockets of some megacorp with unlimited donor bucks.

The real world creates limits to things. Nations can only become so big. Cities can only become so big. Creatures can only become so big. After a point, the pressures against growing start to outweigh the pressure to grow and there's an equilibrium.

Creating an immortal and faceless corporation that makes the creator of that corporation largely blameless for anything that happens in it to a certain point bypasses many of the limitations nature puts on things. Eventually rich people die and they split their fortune among their descendants for example. If individuals are held to account for the consequences of their machinations then that seems like a reasonable limiter.

And if we realize that we can't get anything done because there's too many forms of liability out there, maybe then the incentive will be to chill out a bit. Why should the owner of a megacorp get more protection from such things than a regular person? Just make everyone more free instead of having a loophole to deal with the crippling regulation.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
Twitter had a bad business model. That wouldn't matter if it were a corporation or a sole proprietorship. A corporation is simply a way to separate the financial liabilities from individuals running the company from the company itself. That doesn't mean that individual can't be held legally responsible for their individual actions while running the company, but there is sense in having a layer of separation there.

As far as the Fediverse replacing Twitter, I'm still skeptical. Yes, there is a bit of a run here by folks who were on Twitter. But I'll be interested to see how things look 2-3 years from now. I could just as easily see another big tech platform come along and be the next "hot" thing that people run to. I'm glad the Fediverse is getting exposure, but I'm not convinced it will catch on with the average person who just wants to share pictures of their family, pets, life, etc. and cyberstalk ex's. I am entirely open to being wrong here, but I think a lot of people will look and leave because it isn't like big tech. It's too different. For me, it's a great thing, but I never had a Twitter account in the first place and I have enough tech knowledge to run my own instance. That's not most people.
Show threadsj_zeroNov 19, 2022
I sort of hope you're right, tbh. I don't want or need the fediverse to become yet another oversaturated thing that everyone is using and suddenly everyone needs to control for our own protection.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
I think the software is pretty good. But the dirty little secret is that the two largest instances using this software (forks of Mastodon) .... aren't federated. They are running closer to the traditional social media model. That says something about what people like.
Show threadJillianne Hamilton 📚Nov 19, 2022
@midway can you explain what you mean by this? What are these two instances and why aren’t they federated?
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
@jillianne You can run Mastodon and its various forks without federation so they don’t talk to any other instances. The two giant instances that do this are Gab and Truth Social. Gab turned it off mostly for technical reasons. Federation wasn’t really built for super large instances (think multiple millions of users on one instance) was chewing up crazy amounts of resources which messed up their business model. Truth was most likely because that site wants to be ab echo chamber, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they would run into the same issue. But like then or not, and that’s not particularly relevant to this thread, those instances are much larger than mastodon.social and probably larger than the entire Fediverse at the moment. This software was really designed for lots of smaller instances, not giant monolithic ones. I see that as a feature rather than a flaw but if you are thinking in terms of a traditional social business model (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, et al) it can be an issue.
Show threadJillianne Hamilton 📚Nov 19, 2022
@midway I expected you to mention Counter Social since I believe it was born of a Mastodon instance as well. I didn’t realize those other platforms were too. Yikes.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022
@midway @sj_zero I'm not enjoying this conversation, so I'm going to recuse myself. Good bye.
Show threadDIOGENESOFTORONTONov 21, 2022
@ajroach42 @midway @sj_zero corporations can be held cooperatively. They just usually are not. I used to be against llc. but its not the llc that is the problem its that the shareholders have sole control over the corporation. if there was a more democratic ownership structure this would not be an issue.
Show threadmidwayNov 21, 2022
@sj_zero @ajroach42 @dio Cooperatives are a thing and works in certain Industries like insurance. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn’t make sense for a lot of industries
Show threadSyrusNov 19, 2022

@ajroach42 @sj_zero

Word. The issue is oligarchy. Why can one man destroy Twitter in one month? If we outlawed billionaires, these billionaires would not be free to destroy so much.

Show threadantipode77Nov 19, 2022

@syrus @ajroach42 @sj_zero

Or able to rewrite laws through lobbying with governments, effectively excluding and hampering the citizens of a country at adapting the law to their needs.

When government and companies get to cosy we are in danger of fascism and untempered capitalism.

Look at the Uber case.
https://www.icij.org/tags/uber-files/

Why Is Anti-Monopoly Cool Again? Part I (Big issue 6-24-2019)
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-is-anti-monopoly-cool-again-part

Uber Files Archives - ICIJ

Catch up on all the latest Uber Files stories from ICIJ.

ICIJ
Show threadCarolNov 22, 2022
@syrus @ajroach42 @sj_zero
Oligarchy and Transnational Organized Crime.
Show threadDr Dan MarshallNov 19, 2022
@ajroach42 @sj_zero Man, I don't even know what capitalism is anymore. Part of the problem (from a theoretical standpoint) is that capitalism was originally defined by socialists, who framed it in the terms provided by the labor theory of value. Mainstream has since rejected labor theory in favor of marginal utility. So it's as if the dictionary defined combustion in terms of phlogiston.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022
@DrDanMarshall @sj_zero That's a great point (except that the labor theory of value is still largely correct, have you looked in to the work of Anwar Shaikh at all?)
Show threadDr Dan MarshallNov 19, 2022
@ajroach42 @sj_zero I have not, but I'll add that to my reading list. Do you agree that different kinds of labor are differently elastic in response to demand? (Also, do resources have market value because we produce them, or do we produce them because they have market value?)
Show threadDr Dan MarshallNov 19, 2022

@ajroach42 @sj_zero uh, let me back up. I'm not an economist, I'm a philosopher who's taken a few intro econ courses and I've done some reading on my own. I'm working on an apology for social liberalism, and I'm currently writing a chapter against anarcho-socialism. So I would like to hang out with some anarcho-socialists, to make sure I'm not screwing up.

That said, do y'all grok what I mean by "elastic in response to demand"?

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@DrDanMarshall @sj_zero ah. An apology for social liberalism sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'd hate.

You should pester @connor_dylan

Show threadDr Dan MarshallNov 19, 2022
@ajroach42 @sj_zero @connor_dylan lol. Definitely need to come up with a different title. If Connor show up, I'll try to remember to turn off your mentions.
Show threadVolineNov 19, 2022

@DrDanMarshall @ajroach42 @sj_zero

Adam Smith and David Ricardo also subscribed to the labor theory of value. In the 18th Century it was absolutely the mainstream among the founders of political economy.

The penny didn't drop until some of Ricardo's followers realized that the labor theory necessarily implied that profit was theft that the backpedaling and tracks-covering began.

Show threadDr Dan MarshallNov 19, 2022
@Voline @ajroach42 @sj_zero Yeah, labor theory was mainstream until early 20th Century. The economists who proposed marginal utility were doing some anti-Marxist propaganda. But marginal utility is still a better theory than labor. Dismissing as *just* capitalist propaganda would be committing the genetic fallacy.
Show threadmidwayNov 19, 2022
@ajroach42 @DrDanMarshall @Voline @sj_zero yeah, labor theory of value never made any sense.
Show threadVolineNov 20, 2022

@midway

💤

Show threadDr Dan MarshallNov 20, 2022
@midway @Voline @ajroach42 @sj_zero oh, it made *some* sense back in the day. Karl could probably make some excuse about the value of the *social* amount of labor that goes into sex, and it's resulting exchange value :D
Show threadOlan McGowanDec 16, 2022
@midway @Voline @ajroach42 @DrDanMarshall @sj_zero
ha! Love it
Show threadTorgny Bjers (grim.run adm)Nov 19, 2022
@ajroach42 The main caveats I see are ISPs trying to throttle things if you self-host, as well as people just paying even more money to Amazon, DO, and others.
Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@torgny ... Lots of folks self host on raspberry pis and similar on home connections without giving any money to DO.

Amazon is far from the only cloud provider.

Are you sincerely worried, or are you concern trolling because we don't all run co-los? (I'm working on it, but physical infra takes time.)

Show threadTorgny Bjers (grim.run adm)Nov 19, 2022

@ajroach42 No, not trolling... I am sincerely worried for the people that are self-hosting.

The problem as I see it is mainly with the stack Mastodon runs on.

Node + Rails + Postgres + Redis is a pretty high-level hydra when it comes to fighting the battle of scaling.

Which is obviously why a lot of Mastodon servers are facing issues right now and why there's so much talk about how "slow" Mastodon is.

As if Mastodon is a single entity.

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@torgny Instances are too big. Mastodon isn't the only fediverse software. Scaling this stuff isn't actually that difficult, but it can be expensive if done poorly.

Is there a sustainable business model? That would require there to be a business. I stated pretty clearly that we're mostly a bunch of hobbiests.

as for the scaling problems, DAUs essentially increased 3 - 5x across the whole network, and 10x on many instances. Show me any company that can absorb that much traffic without a hiccup. None of the places I've ever worked could do it.

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@torgny In all seriousness, I'm actively exploring what the expenses would look like for a 10 - 50k user instance, and what the moderation and technical support needs would be.

If we can figure out a way to make it sustainable, we'll do it.

In the meantime, there's no "business model" just people doing a thing because they believe in it.

Show threadTorgny Bjers (grim.run adm)Nov 19, 2022

@ajroach42 I definitely am on the believer side!

I fired this same server up in 2016, ran it for a while and then lost interest because most people were still on Twitter.

Now I'm back, probably for the long haul. And it looks like a bunch of people have made the switch, which is very exciting.

I chose to use DO for this because I am not entirely comfortable hosting a public instance on my home network where I also work.

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@torgny We're on DO at the moment, too, but that's transitional until we end up in the co-lo we're spinning up across town.

I've self hosted from a pi in a closet, I've run containers in the cloud, I've run bare metal in bulgaria. It all just keeps chugging along.

The software, for all my complaints, is pretty good. Throw brutaldon.online in to the mix, and it's downright pleasant.

Show threadTorgny Bjers (grim.run adm)Nov 19, 2022

@ajroach42 That sounds awesome! I definitely host things on a variety of different hardware as well.

I finally got my fourth Pi 4 so I can spin up my home k3s cluster that I put in a cute little 1U rack thingie.

Show threadAdversarial GeographyNov 19, 2022

@ajroach42

As a new user, I couldn't be happier to have found this place. The core philosophy and intended user experience of this platform feels like a very positive evolution of the technology that connects us.

Learning how to participate and contribute, however, has been a bit of an uphill battle. I wish that there were more resources for onboarding new users.

Show threadAndrew (Television Executive)Nov 19, 2022

@Adversarial_Geography It helps on the smaller instances, you normally get a little more handholding.

What help do you need?

Show threadSyrusNov 19, 2022

@ajroach42 ❤️

Thank you!

Show threadGwyndolyn BaneNov 19, 2022
@ajroach42 While it's defiantly an adjustment, I'm hoping this will be a good fit for a weirdo like myself- trans, queer, neurodivergent and NSFW are not really accepted in the greater world, even when you make sure to follow guidelines.