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.
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.