Chris TrottierApr 25, 2023

I’m so confused!

At first @film_girl dismisses worries about defaulting to mastodon.social as “drama and virtue signaling”.

Then she says that migrating from mastodon.social to elsewhere has a big cost because you “can’t take your posts with you.”

Well, this is why mastodon.social shouldn’t be set as the default server to join: stuff like full text search aren’t supported on it, while that feature is supported on other servers.

This concern isn’t virtue signalling.

https://mastodon.social/@film_girl/110256874238800861

Show threadChris TrottierApr 25, 2023

Also, we have to set out the metric for success.

Is our goal to have 100 million accounts on mastodon.social while every other server only has one account?

If that happened, I believe Mastodon would be a failure as a decentralized project.

Mastodon’s success isn’t that 11 million people use it. It’s that it’s part of a network of 24,569 nodes.

Show threadChris TrottierApr 25, 2023

The problem is—and I can’t stress this enough—that certain people just want a Twitter replacement.

They’re not looking long term. They’re not considering future implications on network infrastructure. They’re not foreseeing that a temporary solution could potentially become permanent.

The goal here isn’t just to get everyone off Twitter, it’s to destroy Big Social.

And how to do that? Decentralize!

But if you re-centralize on one server, the Fediverse is as good as dead.

Show threadChris TrottierApr 25, 2023

If your intent is to push people off Twitter towards mastodon.social, then Twitter has won.

Elon musk has a net worth of $174B.

And mastodon.social has a tiny sliver of $300,000 a year.

If Mastodon is re-centralized, it is in a fight that it cannot win. It just takes Elon Musk to buy it outright for the game to be over.

But if Mastodon does what it does best—decentralization—then it will win because Mastodon *cannot* be bought!

Show threadChris TrottierApr 25, 2023

Some people might believe that decentralization is mere idealism, but in fact it's practical.

Yes, centralization is "easy" in more ways than one.

It is easy for onboarding -- but also easy for Big Social to acquire.

Decentralization is hard for onboarding. It is also hard for Big Social to acquire.

I've alluded to this earlier today.

https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/110255664058403160

Show threadChris TrottierApr 25, 2023

I think there's a happy medium between "join the default" and "choose one of 10,000 servers".

Maybe that medium is a wizard that helps people find their *best* Mastodon server.

Show threadLuis M. Gómez C.Apr 25, 2023
@atomicpoet For me, that medium is that when you choose a username the system chooses, by default, a random server between the general purpose ones, with the possibility to change it from a drop down list and a button to explore by categories below that.
Show threadFeralRobotsApr 25, 2023
@KilluaCL
I'd want to see some qualifying criteria, so they wouldn't be putting people on instances that might not be able to scale.
@atomicpoet
Show threadLuis M. Gómez C.Apr 25, 2023
@FeralRobots @atomicpoet I think that wouldn't be difficult since they have the info about servers growth an maybe popularity by region. I remember Eugen told they tried to give small servers more relevance at some point but the problem was that a lot of them doesn't allowed for straight forward sign up, but required an application. So I guess it just take a good criteria considering past experience and improve it if necessary.
Show threadFeralRobots
@KilluaCL
I'm guessing one thing that's going on is that people have been talking about a lot of this stuff for years but now they're in the position of having to DO things. That's often a difficult transition, especially when a lot of unexpected things (like scrambling for more server resources, etc) get in the way.
Success is expensive, in both money & effort. I sympathize.
@atomicpoet
Apr 25, 2023 at 1:37pmWeb
Show threadLuis M. Gómez C.Apr 25, 2023
@FeralRobots @atomicpoet Yeah, I think they're aware of the need but it has to be a fairly good solution, we don't want the platform to change weekly like the other place. As you said, money, as always, is an issue and (I keep citing the verge interview) at least they are also aware of the need to help servers to rise money.