Ev WilliamsWho has a perspective on the future of Mastodon? Where is it going? Where should it go? Either off-the-cuff opinions or pointers to articles are appreciated.
Jan@ev Hmm technical? https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
@jan ah...great.
Peter Merholz@ev this thought piece got a fair amount of play around these parts: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/21/back-to-the-future-how-mastodon-is-restoring-the-lost-art-of-online-conversation
Tim Bray@ev I wrote a few blog pieces as I felt my way in: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/The%20World/Social%20Media/
@timbray excellent thx
J. Nathan Matias 🦣@ev here's my post on the kind of institutions and capacities that Mastodon needs in order to flourish: safety, facilitation/organization, and research.
https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/how-to-avoid-social-media-blight
Jason Fell@natematias @ev for half a second, I wondered why the Knights of Columbus was posting about social media... 😂
pdb
Rob Fahrni
Alex S.@ev The fundamental issue I see repeatedly is that Interoperability (what Mastodon and Fedi truly offers) is a no-brainer for tech-types but completely uninteresting and in some-cases a turn off for laypeople. Creates a huge adoption issue.
@ev I’ve had conversations with people that go “I don’t care that other people can follow me from other servers - I want all my friends to be on the same server as me. Why would I just want some person to be running my server anyways?”
@ev I was collecting tweets about this for a blog post I was planning to write about this phenomenon. I find it fascinating people find Mastodon "too complicated", because I think it's truly as streamlined as it gets for a Fediverse onboarding tool.
@ev What this means in the long term is that it will remain the alt-network that it had been since day one, and I think that's totally okay. I do think it's a shame more people aren't just accidentally adopting an interoperable system
@ev If people were more willing to jump onto Mastodon, I think it'd change the level-of-standards people would have for the other social networks they use. Doctrow writes about this concept a bit.
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy
Privacy Without Monopoly: Data Protection and Interoperability
Update, June 11, 2021: Today, we updated this paper with a new appendix, "The GDPR, Privacy and Monopoly," which analyzes the legal benefits of interoperability under the GDPR, where a regional privacy law creates a sturdy privacy backstop for interoperability remedies. This appendix is also...
@ev I think there's fundamentally two "queues" of people using social media - ones who like their feeds to "stop" - i.e. run out of content once they've caught up with their friends posts - and ones who want a never-ending river of content.
@ev The fact is advertisers love algorithmically driven feeds, and the majority of people either don't care, or actively prefer it. This means corporate social media will adopt this tech more in the future. Mastodon will run parallel to this.
Joe ❌👑
Todd Smith"Why would I just want some person to be running my server anyways?”
I enjoy using Mastodon, but this is a drawback for me as well.
Any long-time user of Reddit will be familiar with instances where a sub-Reddit moderator abused their authority in some fashion or another, and no one wants to be in a position where an (extremely) petty tyrant screws up your feed.
I'm deliberately on a large server for that reason - less chance of the admin being on a power trip.
Patrick H. Lauke@todd_smith @tonic @ev counterpoint, of course, is if you're on a very large instance/site, and the one petty tyrant screws up your feed (see also twitter and Elon) ...
@todd_smith @tonic @ev and of course, the last thing you want is to then also be stuck on a large instance/site, where the admin/org running it then decides to turn into some new closed silo that doesn't want to play nice with other instances, starts ramping up ways to get "engagement" for advertisers, and turns it bit by bit into a venture capitalist feeding trough ... as no doubt is the motivation behind this thread asking the question...
Adam Elman@patrick_h_lauke @todd_smith @tonic @ev The simple (and only, IMHO) way to avoid that is to ensure that anyone who tried that would be missing out on critical content that isn’t hosted on their site. Gmail is an elephant in email, but they can’t simply decide to defederate from SMTP and only allow their users to email other Gmail users. Of course, this risks a small number of players dictating policy to everyone, which is what happened with email.
@tonic @todd_smith @aelman @ev well email is an interesting example, since while it is possible for anybody to set up their own mail server, they'll need to often fight to stay off blocklists or be explicitly added to allowlists. while of course no service would block gmail. also, do you not think that with venture capital backing, they'd be trying to lock in users with "exclusive" content, media deals, tie-ins, before trying to starve competing instances? bless
@patrick_h_lauke @tonic @todd_smith @ev that’s fair - and what I meant by “dictating policy”😀 I agree that VC-backed services are incentivized to keep people on their service by hook or by crook. But better that they’re part of a larger federation. One nice thing: the (realistic) worst-case scenario of a federated world dominated by VC-backed sites still would allow for a separate open-source Fediverse to exist - no worse than what we had before.
@patrick_h_lauke @todd_smith @aelman
As an email server administrator I can't resist to chime back in and say the difficulties are vastly overstated. In 2022 you can setup a mail server and it will mostly just work.
As an email server administrator I can't resist to chime back in and say the difficulties are vastly overstated. In 2022 you can setup a mail server and it will mostly just work.
@patrick_h_lauke @aelman Much like how you can setup a Mastodon or Pleroma server and it will mostly just work, which brings us back into the resilience of this network, threats of defederation be damned
@todd_smith @tonic @ev I remember after a particularly frustrating home-rental experience that I decided I’d only rent homes from professional rental companies from then on. It’s not that those companies are great - FAR FROM IT - but at least they’re going to be consistent. (They’re also not going to suddenly decide to move back into the house you were living in.)
There are down sides to having big players in the space, but IMHO there’s LOTS of upsides for many people.
💙💛:~/eu/pl/priv$
Ada
Blåhaj Zone
Are you a friend of Blåhaj? blahaj.zone is open for registrations for queer folk and their allies. We're a small instance, running on #Calckey (a fork of #Misskey). If you're trans, gender diverse, or just really like plushy sharks, come and join us! We are accepting new members, but remember Blåhaj is a friend and ally to all LGBTQ+ folk!
Pauxlll Kruczynski@ev What rate will you be paying us for our consultation work?
Gabe Rivera@ev My (barely informed) opinion is that simplifying following across servers, supporting QTs or at least readable toot/tweet embeds, and making one's toots optionally searchable would ~10X the number of people who stick around after trying it out.
Kingsley Uyi Idehen@ev,
The future of @Mastodon as a major #Fediverse hub and entry-point continues to grow. As you already know, this is fueled by #Web20's dysfunctional business model (#Privacy compromising #SurveillanceCapitalism).
The #Fediverse, which is much larger than @Mastodon, is even growing further -- opening up new frontiers on the backs of #ActivityPub, #ActivityStreams, and #WebFinger.
IMHO -- this is all about an inevitable move towards #DataSpaces as key units of presence on the #Web 😀
@ev,
We are speeding towards a #Web-presence atom that boils down to a single #hyperlink that denotes an entity, entity type, or entity relationship type.
Eons ago, it was a #Web site, and then it shrunk down to a #Blog, and then a #Tweet (or #Toot), and inevitably a single #hyperlink as a conduit to data, information, and knowledge of interest.
There's a stealthy force pulling the #Fediverse and #LODCloud closer 😊
https://lod-cloud.net/ -- Fediverse == SocialMedia chunk
/cc @Mastodon
Alex Barredo 📉Trump is going back to Twitter, that will bring more of his fans to Twitter... and so, more Twitter users will migrate here. That's the American overview short term. World wide, let's see where the big youtubers and tv people go. Remember Ashton vs CNN fight to one million? we're around that time
Dan Keck@ev My perspective is that Mastodon is easier to figure out than Twitter.
I arrived on social media late. Facebook made sense to me, but Twitter was confusing. I didn't know who to follow, and the front page was just all these people saying very short things that made no sense. Facebook, on the other hand, was populated by my high school classmates and people I knew in my small town. It was easy for me to grasp. (continued)
@dankeck I've never heard anyone say Mastadon is easier than anything. But good.
@ev But now Mastodon seems like the version of Twitter than I can understand. Yes, signup was a little hard. But once I cleared that hurdle, I started finding random people who shared my interests and starting adding them. Now I have a nice timeline of posts about digital accessibility that can help me keep up on trends and attitudes out there. [continued]
@ev Maybe this is how Twitter was too, but by the time I got to it, it overwhelmed me. But Mastodon is moving slowly enough that I was able to jump on the train. I'd be happy if it didn't get much bigger and didn't change into a worldwide popularity contest.
bsky: @daniloc.xyz@ev Part of this future is going to be a strange and wonderful confluence of what people loved about twitter, and what people loved about Google Reader (and Digg before it)
A stream of what is happening, with varied sources that you choose, and dialogue to accompany it all
Much of the promise scoundrels offered around both web3 and ~the metaverse~. Decentralized control of the commons, and more porous borders between different formats of web content, stitched together by open standards.
@ev In other words, Mastodon is just a first representation of a new wave of sociotechnical plumbing, to rival the scale of anything we've seen since the dawn of the web itself
With no central gatekeepers to decide what is a first-class citizen of the fediverse, we may find entirely novel applications of real-time status publishing
It's much easier to imagine the scale of possibility than the specific implementations, and that's an exciting moment for the web
Connor Davies (SirEdav)@ev Where is it going, Cotton-Eye Joe?
Nate@ev My hope is that future of Mastodon is actually rooted in it becoming *less* synonymous with the Fediverse. More use-cases and more platforms would be fun!
(((Ttown)))🌐✌@ev I see Mastodon as an analog to NPR in the US. Individual stations (instances), each individually run and funded, sharing content across the network (federation).
I think as long as folks enjoy their local station (instance) they'll contribute and keep it alive🙂
@ev Off-the-cuff response here on where I’d love to see Mastodon/the Fediverse go: a public square that is impossible for any single entity to co-opt (as has happened with Twitter). I’d like to see governments and companies posting to the Fediverse instead of to Twitter/Insta/FB so that I can follow and interact with them even if I don’t want to use a particular billionaire’s site.
@ev I’d *also* love to see Twitter, Insta, FB, and other sites join Tumblr, Post, (hopefully) Flickr in the Fediverse (alongside Mastodon, Pixelfed, and other Fediverse-native services) so that the people who are already happy with/used to those interfaces can participate in the conversation without the massive switching cost that signing up for Mastodon/Fediverse services currently has.
@ev IMHO, the endgame here involves services that are geared primarily for creators/publishers with large followings (perhaps me.dm ends up in this space), and other services that are geared towards people who are primarily listeners/followers (but sometimes do interact!). Fediverse could bring those groups together while offering specialized capabilities in a way that a single site never could. And for those who want to be completely independent, they’re not cut off.
Jessamyn@ev It's the anarchist utopia online we always wanted and never got. Loosely federated groups of self organized like-minds. Some large, some small, with affinities around several different types of categories (jobs, hobbies, senses of humor, interaction preferences). Some platform constraints, open architecture, many apps and interfaces. Some onboarding friction at the moment, but it's a problem the community can tackle and work on not just complain about. Welcome.
Grant 🇺🇦ArmUkraine🇺🇦@ev Mastodon IS the future.
rstevens 🐳💨✅@ev tooting is fun again!!
Tim Chambers@ev It has the potential to be the first network to prove an open protocol-based social network can scale to something that can reach mass scale. It could be what Blogger and WordPress did for RSS & web content, or what Apple did to enable open Podcast formats.
@mmasnick saw this in 2019:
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech
Dick Hardt 
@ev we (Hellō) just turned up our Mastodon Builder to help with the profile building and identity issues on Mastodon. https://wallet.hello.coop/mastodon -> finding who to follow on Mastodon is still unsolved.
william.maggosthe web, made possible by FOSS and decentralization, allowed total free speech. but lots of great stuff didn't get the attention it deserved. when we think of how free speech makes life better for everyone, it's cause the best info and ideas have gone slowly viral throughout history and changed the culture. decentralized micro blogging lets us decide how that happens now, not big media and advertisers, and worldwide instantaneously. we need to be more responsible, but that's revolutionary.
When We Vote We Win@ev predictions are a foolish waste of time. Follow some people, enjoy the experience. Be happy.
Roger Kimble
Go Sports & Music!@ev The good is 1) no ads, 2) genuine people. 3) Everyone here wants to be here. 4) Thoughtful people who wouldn’t be considered opinion leaders but are still fascinating. (I guess 2-4 is the people but it’s that important) My only negatives are 1) the repeated posts, from reblogs and 2) I wish the top of the thread was always first. I’m completely indifferent to the lack of opinion markers and celebrities and instant information overload (but leaning towards greatful)
@ev Looking forward, I thought the major miss from Twitter was they could have cracked the code on selling print media bundles. Say $12/month for multiple News media access like a Spotify. I have only the vaguest idea what the hell fediverse means, but if it needs income, I wonder if a media bundle subscription would be an answer in the future.
vktonik
Zalasur 🐸🇺🇦@ev I don't think it will replace Twitter. But then again, I don't think anything will replace Twitter. I do think Mastodon will be part of a bigger thing that's going be larger than any one platform.