I’m right in the middle of the move so I don’t have time to write anything at length on the whole “mastodon.social rolling out the red carpet for Threads/Instagram/Meta/Zuckerberg” thing.
In a nutshell:
- The *only* leverage the fediverse has over a trillion-dollar corporation is social legitimacy.
- That is exactly what the flagship instance is providing to Meta.
- It matters less whether your tiny/personal instance blocks them; given their size, you’re effectively blocking yourself.
…
- The fact we have a flagship instance and that mastodon.social didn’t close signups ages ago is a huge part of the problem. They could have set a social precedent (large instances are a no-no) – they didn’t.
- When Threads federates, it will become the flagship instance.
- Eugen is basically handing the crown to Mark.
- The fact there is a crown to start with is a shortcoming of the federated model with instances that can scale indefinitely. (How else could things be done? See #SmallWeb)
…
- This is classic embrace, extend, extinguish.
Clearly, some of you folks don’t know your classics. If you need a refresher, see this:
https://beehaw.org/post/719121
- We know the business model of Meta (people farming / surveillance capitalism). We know it’s toxic. We know that any publicly-traded trillion-dollar corporation plays a zero-sum game. There is nothing, nothing that justifies giving them the benefit of the doubt except utter naïvety, verging on malicious negligence.
…
All that said, it feels like this ship has already sailed.
The only person who can really make an impact here is Eugen – by taking a principled stance against Meta – and that’s clearly not what he’s doing.
Without that, we are witnessing the normalisation of Meta/surveillance capitalism on the fediverse.
The only time you have any power over a trillion-dollar corporation/VC-backed startup is at the start & your only real leverage is making it socially unacceptable. And we’ve surrendered that.
… As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always seen the fediverse as a useful bridge and a means of reaching like-minded folks for what comes next.
In my mind, what comes next (not in that it will replace the fediverse or the web we have but in that it will exist alongside them) is the Small Web.
Think: everyone has their own “instance of one” (to borrow a fediverse term) in a peer-to-peer web that’s designed for that from the start.
Updated June 19th, 2023 Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download Small Is Beautiful #23 directly, and watch it with your favourite video player. Small Is Beautiful (Oct, 2022): What is the Small Web and why do we need it? Today, I want to introduce you to a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age – that I’ve spoken about for a while but never specifically written about:
… That’s what I’m working on and that’s what I see as one possible long-term solution.
But I do love the fediverse and I see a continued need for the fediverse and what I want to see will be harder to achieve without the fediverse as a bridge so I would really love to see us not fuck it up or surrender it to the Zuckerbergs of the world.
I’ve said my piece.
Make of it what you will.
I don’t care to argue about it. Not my circus, not my monkeys.
And I’ve got boxes to pack.
@aral i read all this and agree and i’m still charting in the same direction as you. my draw here was never about reaching a large audience, but maintaining a meaningful global dunbar.
good luck with the move!
@tychi oh, that's a lovely expression: a meaningful global dunbar 
I'd like to adopt it: who can I tribute?
I don’t fully understand the detail of the #SmallWeb stuff that @aral@mastodon.ar.al does (yes, I’ve read and watched videos, but am not enough of a techy enough to know how to use it), but I (think I) understand the principles. That’s the basis for explaining why #Threads federating to mastodon.social is a problem - and it makes complete sense: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/111591406794024975 My Mastodon instance has blocked #Threads (we voted overwhelmingly - thanks @admin!), and despite being grateful for all @Gargron@mastodon.social has done and is doing, I don’t understand why Eugen seems so excited by #Threads.
Maybe join a Fedipact server?
@aral good packing, thanks for being a voice of reason.
Happy christmas too.
@aral Yes, I understand. The thing is, it's not a billionaire who is the proprietor, it's set up as a community platform built by participants. Personally, I think safety/anti-harassment tools are really important.
Because the billionaires don't give a crap about (marginalised) people, and Spoutible gives a voice to people corporate media and other social platforms ignore completely.
Especially with the US Elections coming up, that's important.
But I won't bother you any further ;-)
@aral Why is "instance-of-one" different from instances-for-many?
- If you are hosting Kitten instances, will you host avowed Nazis?
- How will you respond if you find that you're hosting a Kitten instance that publishes child porn?
- How would a Kitten hosting service with 100 million instance-of-one's be better than a single instance serving 100 million accounts?
- An instance-for-many can efficiently share storage, operations, etc. in ways that an instance-for-one cannot. Does that matter?
@bobwyman It’s the difference between a community of individuals and a community of fiefdoms.
- Why do you think we would host Nazis? Avowed or otherwise. Our host will decide who to host and who not to host based on its own rules. Other hosts will choose to host based on theirs. If you want to you can self host by your own rules. None of this is rocket science.
- We would respond by removing the account. Why, how would you respond?
…
- Domain is designed not to scale to those numbers. We don’t need 100s of millions of people to host to be sustainable. The only reason there’s even going to be a commercial aspect is because our societies are not smart enough to support such initiatives from the commons for the common good and we have to in order to have basic necessities like food and shelter. We do the best within the primitive societies we were born into.
…
- Sharing storage is an optimisation that we will look into if it ever becomes an issue. I don’t think it will. Say you build a social app on the Small Web. You would design it so that if you share a 2GB movie, you do it on your own device. Unlike ActivityPub, you wouldn’t put that burden on every server that federates with you. People access anything you share from your server. They don’t make a copy of it (unless they want to).
</thread>
@spritelyinst and @VeilidNetwork are likely to see an explosion of development as a means of evolving the fediverse into a more privacy focused space.
@aral no no.
We don't have to fall victim to the scam.
We won't be 'popular,' we will be 'ignored,' we will be 'laughed at' and when they move on having sucked the life out of everything following their trap we will still be here.
Showing how it can be done without toxicity.
(And constantly fighting it, and constantly getting tired of explaining why we don't just give in, and helping those who can't help but give in because they have fewer choices.)
So while the ship may have sailed... you and I, and several others we can both name, weren't interested in where it was sailing to in the first place... and the ship had that odd smell of decay.
Yeah, um...
Not easily. As you can tell from just trying to follow, this subject is both extremely wide and deep... because it's all the history of the internetz, and the history of people.
And just the histories you and I have been personally involved with can't be summarized easily xD
So... what's THIS immediate kerfuffle?
Another attempt a large company (the one that recently rebranded to hide itself from it's,legacy of bad behavior) to take what folks built without them, and turn it into a profit point, without paying anyone.
@aral meta also uses IP, DNS, and HTTP. I’d like to see AP reach that level of ubiquity.
Federating doesn’t give meta any more access than they have right now to fedi data, does it?
@aral that’s where I have an issue though. Normal people do not sign up for truth social.
That’s an instance I would preemptively block.
Those are different people than those signing up for threads. Why pretend like they’re comparable?
Truth social may as well be GAB.
@aral my mom isn’t going to get on mastodon just like she’s not going to get on Signal.
She’s on Facebook because it’s what she knows just like she uses iMessage.
You’re too online if you think everyone on Meta’s platforms made a conscious choice to use Meta’s services and knows about the alternatives.
Compare that to GAB/Truth Social. They know the alternatives - they got kicked off of them.
>> Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.
Hear hear!
Here’s the blog link:
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
@aral I agree that that mastodon.social is part of the problem and especially the changed policy to onboard new users primarily there.
However, about the size of instances: while the #BigInflux happened, I did a poll what the ideal size would be for that instance. Result was about 25k-50k at most. I find that a resonable size for large instances.
Currently I'm about 10k as instance because I have a cleanup script and a open/close signups script, that play nicely together.
But I also focus...
@aral ... on having a inactive/active user ratio of 0.5 or higher.
Without the #BigInflux I would have grown maybe to around 2k-5k user maximum. That would mean 1k-2.5k MAUs, which is a rather nice size, I think. Manageable for most hobbyists and not too much money involved.
@aral I agree that there shouldn't be a small number of large instances, but plainly saying it shouldn't happen isn't providing any reasonable alternatives.
People feel like the fedicerse is overly complex & write it off. The same is true of making personal websites. This might not actually be true (in my opinion it isn't), but the fact that people feel this way is why mastodon.social is as large as it is.
@aral your first point is the one I agree with the most.
Mastodon got away from its roots when most all refugees joined mastodon.social over the last year. The interface to find smaller instances was never a priority so it’s fallen flat.
Therefore, mastodon.social *is* mastodon, to the rest of the internet. And after the integration, threads.net will be mastodon to the rest of the internet.
@aral I disagree
first, there's nothing to prevent this from happening in ActivityPub. mastodon.social is the foremost instance for most people, but it's not the only instance. getting people off of other platforms as easily as possible is important, which is why it hasn't shut down signups
the resistance to Threads is also important, but the longevity of ActivityPub doesn't depend on it. the concern is that there is a huge platform with little moderation adopting this niche platform
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