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 @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"