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
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?
Andrea@Meaningness subscription-model services are conceivable; the alternative to advertisers paying for platforms is users paying for them
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)