Mastodawn

Like if you have a bunch of perfectly spherical individuals running around in a frictionless vacuum sure it makes sense.

But in the real world where you have like… actual networks to deal with, and partitions, and security patches, and spammers, and CSAM, and… to deal with.

We need to consider the degree to which this fetishization of single user servers is meaningfully coherent as a strategy.
https://hachyderm.io/@hrefna/113899314270714595

Hrefna (DHC) (@[email protected])

@[email protected] People fetishize this idea of one person servers, but it's really not a good idea on multiple levels (on SO MANY levels, really) even to the degree that one can technically do it.

Hachyderm.io

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Cassandrich Jan 27, 2025

@hrefna AP based fedi (not to mention the fake decentralized stuff like bsky) is not well suited to single user instances.

You can't leverage shared moderation resources, or the aspect of instance as a privacy union that makes it safe to forward reports to other instances or post links to external sites without them being able to track who shared it.

We can build a new fedi with autonomous identity & flexible hosting, but it's a big project. And until then, well-run shared instances are the best path we have.

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db0 Jan 27, 2025

@hrefna I actually like that fediverse promotes the concept of an affinity group being the smallest most efficient unit

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Helge Jan 27, 2025

I can take the affinity group naming one step further. I think the following example illustrates pretty well, when running your own server saves network resources.

Let's call a group of people that mostly follow each other an echo chamber. Then running a Fediverse server for this group probably saves cost. Why? Most of the traffic generated from following other people stays inside the server and thus doesn't have to travel through the network.

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db0 Jan 27, 2025

@helge @hrefna

> Let's call a group of people that mostly follow each other an echo chamber.

let's not