David ChapmanBut, The Right Thing doesn't exist yet, and this does. So the question for potential users is whether to take the risk of building a following here (and encouraging followers to migrate from twitter) when it could easily fail in any of the usual ways, within days or months. I don't have an opinion yet :)
Sonya Mann@Meaningness I feel pretty torn about this, and also uneasy about this instance's policies w/r/t heterodox thinking
Andrea@sonya @Meaningness well, it's not like any of us are deleting our Twitter accounts yet
For all users, it's worth checking out the mastodon.social content moderation guidelines, at https://mastodon.social/about/more
As @sonya points out, not everyone may be happy with them.
As our host @Gargron point out, if you don't like them, you can run your own instance.
But instances choose who they peer with... so the Mastodon-based network may balkanize.
I'm starting to think that the right use-case for Mastodon is not as a Twitter alternative (long-term public presence) but as a Slack alternative (private and often short-lived discussion groups, or organizational intranet).
A group is motivated to pay for its own instance so long as it is useful... Who is motivated to operate one as a public service, with years-long commitment?
@Meaningness subscription-model services are conceivable; the alternative to advertisers paying for platforms is users paying for them
@puellavulnerata I think this OUGHT to have been the model for the whole web all along. It was the original model (Xanadu). It's the right thing.
But almost no one has succeeded because (1) the hassle of signing up for zillions of separate services is too great and (2) everyone got used to "the web is free" and thinks it's a moral affront to be asked to pay for it.
@Meaningness well, most available payment methods also being horrible privacy hazards is also a thing, as is credit cards having way too much trust
@puellavulnerata Yeah. So, then you think "bitcoin!" Except that has all the bitcoin problems.
Hard problem is hard.
@Meaningness bitcoin isn't really very privacy-friendly; zcash has potential though
@puellavulnerata Right... someone needs to draw out the tree of this thought process, because many of us have explored it out quite a number of levels :)
@Meaningness @puellavulnerata
> everyone got used to "the web is free" and thinks it's a moral affront to be asked to pay for it.
IMO this is the wrong way of thinking about it. It's more that if someone can be offered for free and monetized through advertising, it will be, and social networking needs super low friction to scale.
@sonya @Meaningness yeah, it's hard to talk people into paying to try out new things, so the advertising model always has an initial edge. We only get away from it when a smooth migration/coexistence path exists.
@puellavulnerata @Meaningness a lot of pay-to-belong Slacks exist that intrigue me, but I don't want to deal with the hassle of getting a refund if the value isn't actually there
Most Johnly of Henries@puellavulnerata @Meaningness This seems to be the sticker I can't think of a good solution for. Are there a lot of people for whom this is a problem? The ugly solution is to have another user "verify" that anon-user has paid, and then those two coordinate payment offline somehow. But the only alternative to "paid" is "free", which inevitably carries ads -> eventual censorship.
@johnhenry @Meaningness nah, the solution is real anonymous-payment systems. For centrally-issued cryptocurrencies this was a delightfully solved problem in the 1990s [1]; now Zcash seems to be solving it for decentralized ones.
[1] https://static.aminer.org/pdf/PDF/000/120/358/universal_electronic_cash.pdf
@puellavulnerata @johnhenry Has the same bandwidth issues as bitcoin though, doesn't it? Which means micropayments need sidechains, which gets you into that whole subtree of issues.
@Meaningness @johnhenry yeah, *decentralized cryptocurrency* isn't a completely solved problem yet for that reason. Hilariously enough, I predicted the bitcoin scaling problems in 2011 and missed most of the boom because of it :P
@Meaningness @johnhenry I don't think it's necessarily fatal because options like "let transaction fees regulate on-chain transactions to what can be handled, and use Bitcoin to back other, lower-transaction-cost systems" exist.
For example, the fatal weakness of the old, centralized cryptocurrencies was the e-gold problem: the state can try to kill the issuer. In a bitcoin-backed world, the issuer could be pseudonymous (but then, trust problems).
@puellavulnerata @johnhenry Not necessarily fatal; but no one has actually made this work in practice yet, afaik, despite 639 SV startups trying
@Meaningness @johnhenry well, e-gold got the 'popular currency' part without the crypto part and then got squished - I expect anyone who gets the latter right enough to become popular and attract attention *and can be found* will end the same way
@johnhenry @Meaningness bitcoin has a big advantage going for it: it's really, really hard to kill
@puellavulnerata @Meaningness Unless you're a chinese mining conglomerate and control 45% of the hash power or something *grumble grumble*
@puellavulnerata @johnhenry It doesn't pay to be too smart. I always figured the optimal IQ was about 130, but saw a paper recently saying it's 120. (My impression is that 120s can barely tie their shoes, much less predict cryptocurrency scaling problems...)
@Meaningness @johnhenry lol, that's about my impression of 120s too :P
@sonya @puellavulnerata @johnhenry Well, in this case, it was success as a middle manager in a boring company. Basically you can't have a real conversation across more than a 15-point gap, so if you are managing 105s, 120 is as high as you can go. I guess. (Sorry if this sounds sneering; I'm interested more in the natural history of this than in sneering. Although sneering is sort of fun too.)
@sonya @puellavulnerata The subtext is that many very-high-IQ people are miserable because it's hard to find a social niche when you can talk to almost no one.
Fortunately, I am dumb enough for this not to be a problem for me personally.
@Meaningness same. I don't know what my exact IQ is — I can have basic ingroup conversations with @puellavulnerata so maybe that's a way to benchmark, lol
@sonya Well @puellavulnerata is somewhere in the 300s I would guess, so...
@Meaningness @sonya stop flattering me
@puellavulnerata @Meaningness re: happiness, I can definitely see how it would be isolating to be 99.999999999 percentile (or whatever the appropriate amount of nines is)
@puellavulnerata @Meaningness I guess it's a question whether regular users should just "wait" until that technology develops to the point where they can use them, or whether people should work on solutions today to stop feeding the Facebook/Twitter ad machine. I don't want to leave hyper-privacy-conscious users in the dark, but that's a way harder problem than "just alternative to centralized Twitter crap"
Hallå Kitteh@meaningness The Slack alternative is #matrix ( https://matrix.org/ ), specifically, https://riot.im/app/ . It federates, and there are bridges to other services, for example I participate on #freenode through it.
@lambadalambda offers an independent #riot instance at https://matrix.heldscal.la/ .
@lambadalambda offers an independent #riot instance at https://matrix.heldscal.la/ .
[EUnomia Trust Factor: 21/100]@Meaningness @sonya I've watched this play out and have had to deal with it since the first time it happened, I may have made the first (long-term) server ever completely blocked by other servers. I've watched how it played out with my own and with other servers if you ever want to know about that.
@Meaningness @sonya
>I don't think it addresses any of the hard issues
tough, but fair
m0n5t3r@meaningness you may want to have a look at other instances (let's say the ones with most interesting people are blocked on mastodon) , there is a list at http://www.fediverse.org/
I understand some people in this new wave are planning to start a new instance, this would actually be great - hell, a bunch of us run single-person or single person + markov bot(s) instances
Also take a look at the other implementations (stock gnusocial, postActiv - which is @maiyannah's fork that is trying to bring sanity to the ancient GS code); they're "bleah, php" instead "bleah, ruby" and they have their warts, but they are reasonably easy to set up for a technical person
P.S. obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1lYU5CA40o
I understand some people in this new wave are planning to start a new instance, this would actually be great - hell, a bunch of us run single-person or single person + markov bot(s) instances
Also take a look at the other implementations (stock gnusocial, postActiv - which is @maiyannah's fork that is trying to bring sanity to the ancient GS code); they're "bleah, php" instead "bleah, ruby" and they have their warts, but they are reasonably easy to set up for a technical person
P.S. obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1lYU5CA40o
@MoonMan @Meaningness why were you completely blocked by the other servers?
@sonya my server is doesn't have many speech limitations, so it runs up against hate speech etc. There also were some flare-ups between my users and mastodon users. The first server we were blocked by was an instance dedicated for pornography, they blocked our entire instance because the admin said somebody on my server said something rude to him, haha.
@sonya basically my rules on speech are 1. no doxing 2. honor blocks, if someone blocks you, don't get around the block to keep messaging at them 3. dont do anything that will take down the server, either technical (aka hacks) or legal.