Mastodawn

Bob Mottram Apr 17, 2017

The fact that mastodon apparently doesn't scale well could be a feature rather than a bug. You probably don't want thousands of users on a single server, since that brings with it all sorts of problems - social, technical, economic.

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manicphase Apr 17, 2017

@bob I think it's interesting that it can sort of bring the social contract back into social media to have a federation.

I'm planning on starting my own instance when I have some money, then I can host friends and family on it. Spam and vitriol won't even be a concern.

My worry about technical issues is what happens to the horizontal scalability when there's hundreds of thousands of instances all trying to keep up with eachother?

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Bob Mottram

@manicphase and that's something like the FreedomBox idea. You host yourself or a small number of friends and family, and then federate with the rest. It doesn't need to be a massive and expensive server.

I've been in the fediverse for a long time and while vitriol is sometimes a problem spam hasn't been much of a problem so far. Intrinsically there's nothing to stop people from posting ads, it's just that in the fediverse they would be easier to block and there are no algorithmic timelines and bribed posts so far (though that might be coming).