Seanwhite
Dave Winer's linkblog in MastoTech Journalism Doesn’t Know What to Do With Mastodon.
https://worldhistory.medium.com/tech-journalism-doesnt-know-what-to-do-with-mastodon-df1309f088a0
xndr✨@dave a sign of something meaningful + big happening
Brewster KahleHow can we support Mastodon, as a community, so its tech stays resilient to the inevitable challenges ahead?
I morn the fate of usenet and email. oh, and RSS.
antipode77For all 3 of them news of their demise is greatly exagerrated.
The Ferridge@antipode77
@brewsterkahle @dave
I agree. RSS, at least, died only a death of popularity. It otherwise works as well as ever
Spencer W Hunter
brewster -- what a thrill to hear from you!
it's all about interop, between people and software.
if people see the benefit of USING mastodon, it could become as popular as all the tech you mention.
and personally I've been building on RSS all of this year, because i thought something like this moment was coming. ;-)
http://scripting.com/2022/12/24/162940.html
We'll know it's working if most people feel their best place to write is their blog, where the editing tools work just as they like them to, and there are no boundaries to where those ideas can be published.
ChrisQ@brewsterkahle @dave Why do I have to edit where I post? That seems a little reductive. Can you tell me more about why that’s good?
kleks@dave Do you remember when some time ago, a Finnish youngster with a name of Linus decided to wire an OS? Same story. No one owns it, it is maintained by teams, etc etc.
Colin Fry
quixote@colinfry666 @kleks @dave Funny that at the time there were no articles predicting linux would outlast the desktop 😆
Kins
Eva Debora Pavlíková@dave brilliantly good points. Thanks for sharing👍
"Extinct" Onceler@dave an AI seems to have written this
Been following FOSS culture for almost 15 years. What u said was always the mantra.
During this time FB, Google and Twitter took over the world. So maybe the mantra should be changed.
The values should definitely brought up with every occasion, but strategizing based on the idea that "enough" people will choose "values over usability", is not realistic and even worse, it's self-defeating.
Dynom@dave right now, Mastodon isn't sustainable. People are losing money on it. The donation situation won't last and frankly i don't think it's fair.
I read familiarities in the post, but I also think it misses the mark. There is just less to write about, which isn't something uncomfortable, there is just fewer information value. And frankly a lot is written about Mastodon, although lots of parroting, as usual.
Mastodon isn't done inventing itself, which is good. Means we re-witness inception.
cedricdes
Mario Torre@cedricdes @dynom @dave i don’t think this is very sustainable either, it looks like it requires a massive amount of disk space to cache content across instances, even for single user instances. And not everyone will have the necessary skills to run their own hone servers, let alone safely.
@cedricdes @dave running it securely and staying current with patches will be an issue. Regardless, people need to maintain and pay the electricity bill.
Operational effort often scales pretty well. Few large is much more efficient over many small. Especially here with Mastodon due to how the content moves around.
I think we'll end up seeing a small group of large Mastodon clusters, with a premium model to pay the specialists keeping it all safe.
But the there is are still the legal issues.
Sergi@sergi @dave it still costs money and without compensation the entire network is losing money and therefore is unsustainable.
Either it needs to be (state-) funded (without influence, thats virtually undoable), or should have a premium tier that also compensates for free accounts (a bit what @protonvpn does).
As long as instances are run mostly on goodwill, it'll be fragile.
Peter Brown@dynom @dave following 14 with four followers it’s not surprising you’re finding things a bit thin. Even with 300 followers, I am still only 10% of my Twitter following and things are taking a long time to get back to where they were. 
But they will.
And as we build our followed and following numbers, so the liveliness of the timeline will increase. All we can do meantime is increase the numbers and boost relentlessly.
But they will.
And as we build our followed and following numbers, so the liveliness of the timeline will increase. All we can do meantime is increase the numbers and boost relentlessly.
Peter Butler@dave I have a bias, but I have not seen much of this:
>> Gotta love tech journalists who describe Mastodon as “that impossible-to-use website.”
There were a few stories like that in early November maybe, but that’s not the impression I’ve gotten since from mainstream news orgs.
That seems like a bit of a strawman.
Sir Dr Rusty o the Isle 🖤💛❤️@dave too much tech journalism is driven by the same forces that want Birdland to survive, #Greed, #Power, #Control #Commercialism
For many its the only world they've known.
When we worked on #ARPANet in the 1970s the audience was limited and the rules were basically simple and enforceable. The focus was on the technology, not on the culture and management issues. I was probably one of the few social scientists on the system in 1970 and we weren't having to worry about bad actors on #ARPANet but our buildings were under threat by bombmakers similar to what happened at U of Wisconsin.
We almost certainly underestimated the potential of bad actors.
For many its the only world they've known.
When we worked on #ARPANet in the 1970s the audience was limited and the rules were basically simple and enforceable. The focus was on the technology, not on the culture and management issues. I was probably one of the few social scientists on the system in 1970 and we weren't having to worry about bad actors on #ARPANet but our buildings were under threat by bombmakers similar to what happened at U of Wisconsin.
We almost certainly underestimated the potential of bad actors.
@dave
For those who want more of the story
