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
@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